


Structural Integrity: or, how Jo Watson met Moriarty after Reichenbach

by pendrecarc



Series: Suite for Strings and Steel [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, F/M, Gen, Genderswap, Hiatus, ongoing series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-05
Updated: 2011-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there are consequences for prior actions, Mycroft Holmes has his manicured fingers in a few too many pies, and Jo Watson negotiates civilian life with mixed success.</p><p>(Please note that this is an instalment in an ongoing series. As such, it provides neither a beginning nor a tidy conclusion.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Report of Dr Watson

**Author's Note:**

> This picks up some weeks after Boston Marriage (please do read that first!) and relies heavily on events in Doyle's canon.
> 
> Many thanks to verity for all the encouragement and innie for the beta!

“My French is appalling,” Jo says.

“Mine is excellent. We’ll pass without trouble.”

Jo shifts a little, the cross supports of the packing crate digging into her much-abused back. “Of course we will,” she says, smiling a little at the image of a young Sherlock dashing about underfoot, jabbering at Mycroft in French. “Mummy had an au pair, I suppose, and you’ll speak it like a very posh native.”

“If I choose.” She can’t see Sherlock’s face in the dark of the cargo hold. “More usually it’s like a stevedore from a Marseilles dockyard, which is where I learnt.”

Jo laughs at the delightful unexpectedness of this, and the sound of it echoes oddly in that space, which somehow manages to seem cramped and empty at the same time. If she lies very still, she thinks she can almost feel the motion of the waves. Unlikely, on a ship this size, but it is more than eleven hours from Portsmouth to Saint-Malo, and she needs something to occupy her mind.

Something aside from wondering what they’ll find on the other side of the Channel, that is.

“Do you think they know where we are?”

“Unlikely.”

“How long will it take them to find out?”

It is not a question of if, but when. This is a truth they’ve acknowledged between them without ever needing to voice it aloud.

They lie there without speaking. Jo listens to the steady sound of air moving through Sherlock’s lungs and imagines it comes in time with the waves.

“Not long,” Sherlock says at last, and Jo nods into the darkness around them.

 

***

 

 **Chapter One: First Report of Dr Watson**

 

Jo heard muffled voices from the corridor and looked up, unable to manage anything like real interest. Odds were good that when the door opened it would only admit another government official in a suit who would sit opposite her and ask the same set of questions she’d already faced a dozen times over. His English would be better than hers, his accent would be just precise enough to put her in her place, and her responses would not have changed in the slightest.

She was right about part of that. When the door did open, the man standing behind it was indeed a suited bureaucrat with an accent calculated for maximum intimidation, but the moment she recognised him she knew he’d come with an entirely different set of questions.

“Good afternoon, Dr Watson,” said Mycroft Holmes.

She said nothing as he exchanged a word with someone outside. He closed the door and came to sit opposite her, the shining expanse of empty table the only buffer between them. Fluorescent lighting didn’t suit him at all, she thought, then reconsidered; it was possible the strain peeking out from under his usual aplomb had another source.

An unhurried silence settled around them. Presumably he expected her to say something, but Jo was not about to start this conversation herself, and at this point she had nothing but time. She crossed her arms and waited, speculating idly on the cost of his elegant and understated wristwatch.

“I see you’ve been treated well,” he said at last.

Jo shrugged. “I could use a bath and a change of clothes.”

“That can be arranged.”

“I’d appreciate it, if you haven’t got bigger fish to fry,” Jo said.

He didn’t so much as blink at having his own words thrown back at him, but clearly he remembered the interview. He’d refused his help on that occasion, even when she’d warned him Sherlock might be in over her head. “Touché, Dr Watson. Not nearly so gauche as ‘I told you so’, but quite as effective.”

“I do what I can.”

“As gratified as I am to find that your rather pawky sense of humour remains undimmed by yesterday’s events, I should remind you that your situation is a serious one. Despite their international reputation for pacifism and philanthropy, the Swiss are disinclined to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration. There is no record of your entering the country, and in lieu of a passport you’ve presented them with an unregistered firearm and an unlikely story.”

“It’s the truth.”

“And I’m afraid in this case a lie is far more likely to set you free. I shall see about constructing a suitable one.”

It occurred to her to wonder why he cared enough to spend his no-doubt valuable time and political favours on her. Aloud, she said, “Is that why you flew out here?” He answered that with the silence it deserved, and Jo shook her head, chastened. “I’m sorry. What do you want to know?”

“I have of course read the statement you gave. Was it accurate?”

“Yes.”

“Was it complete?”

“Of course not.”

“Suppose we start with your omissions, then.” He leant back in his chair. “How did you cross the border?”

“In the vault of an armoured van,” Jo said. That had not been an enjoyable few hours, but it had been secure, or so they’d thought. The Swiss no longer required full checks of all vehicles coming from France, but there had always been the risk of a random search—and besides, it wasn’t the authorities they’d been hiding from. “One of Sherlock’s—”

“Her old client, yes, the banker from Interlaken. I should have known. And you crossed the channel in a cargo ship on the Portsmouth-Saint-Malo line. I was at least able to track you that far.”

“You weren’t the only one.”

“Indeed. When did you first become aware that you’d been followed?”

“Two weeks ago, I think, in Geneva. That’s when I started wondering.” Sherlock had known much earlier, but that went without saying. “She’d have managed better without me.”

“Undoubtedly.”

Jo hadn’t meant to say that, but she’d thought it so frequently since leaving London that it had just slipped out. She and Mycroft Holmes stared at one another, and for a moment she wondered if his response had been any less involuntary.

“What happened at Meiringen?” he asked at length.

“You said you read my statement.”

“It provided insufficient detail.”

“How is my sister?”

“Alive.” Jo flinched. “She is recovering. Tell me what happened yesterday at Reichenbach.”

Jo shook her head. “Get me out of here, and then we’ll talk.”

“As always, your assumptions about the extent of my political influence are vastly exaggerated.”

“I doubt it.”

“Dr Watson, is James Ryder dead, or isn’t he?”

“He is,” Jo said.

“And Sebastian Moran?”

A beat. “Not yet.” The deadness in her voice frightened her, and her palm itched for cool metal.

He actually smiled, then stood and bowed with the barest inclination of his head. There was a question missing there, one they both knew he should have asked but hadn’t, and Jo wasn’t sure whether she should be grateful for that.

As he turned, the one question _she_ really wanted answered came spilling past her lips. “Have they found her body?”

He stilled with his hand on the knob. She couldn’t see his face.

“No,” he said, and was gone.

***

When they came to retrieve her several hours later, she was brought to what might have passed as a guest room in a low-budget hotel if the locks hadn’t been on the wrong side of the door. It was small and ruthlessly drab, but it was clean and had its own shower, and folded on the bed were two pairs of trousers and three pullovers Jo had last seen when she’d packed her civilian clothes into Harry’s storage cupboard. Her under-things were hidden delicately underneath. Jo had a sudden image of Mycroft Holmes going through her laundry, and shuddered, then thought with some small relief that it had probably been the assistant.

He sent for her again the next day, and the day after, each time looking just a little older and more polished. Each time he managed to wring a little more out of her. “Why do you care?” she asked, tired beyond belief for all she’d spent the time in a quiet room with a comfortable cot. “It’s done. They’re dead, Ryder and Sherlock both.”

“But the organisation remains, however loosely connected it may be,” he said. “Ryder was only Moriarty’s most obstreperous member. Sherlock gave me no fewer than five names at the highest levels of the group, but she was unable to provide hard proof for all of them, and she had reason to believe there were others.”

She had no real interest in feeding Mycroft Holmes’ curiosity, but she’d had time to think of questions of her own, and some of them took precedence over stony and resentful silence. “Was Sonia Ginzberg one of them?” The name stuck in Jo’s throat.

“Your psychiatrist?” Evidently this came as a surprise. “Sherlock never mentioned her.”

“I don’t think she knew,” Jo said. “Not until the end.”

Mycroft nodded. “Her car was pulled from the Thames with bullet-holes through the rear window and windscreen, and her body was found several hours later. The timing of her death was too closely tied to your disappearance to be merely coincidental, but I assumed she was collateral damage. I take it that was an error. Do you have proof?”

“Ryder was a patient of hers. She told me. And Moran, too, according to Sherlock. I’m not certain about the others.”

“Circumstantial,” Mycroft said, “though it certainly provides an avenue of inquiry. I’ll look into her patient files.”

Jo shook her head. “But she’s dead, too.”

“Yes, that seems to be _en vogue_.” His gaze narrowed. “Was it at your hand?”

Ginzberg was a dead weight under her arm, and the cold water pulled at them with relentless fingers. “More or less,” Jo said. “Was that all you wanted?”

He gave her the same look he’d worn when she’d refused to let him examine her hand on their first meeting, the infuriating Mycroft-knows-best expression laced with such unquestioned and unquestioning privilege that the only possible responses were acquiescence or physical violence. So far she’d tended toward the former, but it struck Jo that eventually he was going to misjudge his audience, and at that point things might well change. “ _I_ am not your enemy, Dr Watson.”

“I know,” she said. “Pretty sad state of affairs, that.”

He offered her a smile that was mostly grimace, and she did not see him again for three whole days. She dreamt of falling water and woke longing for her gun.

A week after she’d been taken into custody, her solitary breakfast was interrupted by a knock at the door. They had not yet invaded the privacy of her room, so usually this meant a summons to further interrogation elsewhere, but when she opened the door on this occasion it was not to find an escort waiting outside. Instead, Mycroft Holmes stood in the hall.

“What are you doing here?” Jo asked automatically, but even as she said it she was absorbing the change in him. He was no less polished, carried no less of an air of cool subtlety, and so it was difficult to put her finger on what precisely she saw that morning that she had not seen before, but there was something _alive_ in him that had not been on their last meeting.

“I’ve made arrangements for your release,” he said. The alteration was even present in his voice, a sort of vibrance under tight control.

“What’s happened?”

“What has happened, Dr Watson, is that the Swiss authorities have agreed to release you.” He handed her a bulky manila packet. She opened it warily and peered inside. There were several glossy slips of paper beneath the dark red of a passport—her own, going by the stamps on the back—but the bulk and the weight came from the handgun nestled inside. “Your flight leaves in two hours. There is a car waiting downstairs, and you’ll find all the necessary documents authorising the carriage of a firearm on board an international aircraft. Those were not easy to obtain. Do try to be discreet about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I would prefer to avoid another international incident.”

“You know what I meant. Why now? What’s changed?”

“Nothing at all. The wheels of bureaucracy turn in their own time.”

“Bullshit,” Jo said. He raised one delicate eyebrow. “What’ve you done?”

“ _I_ have done very little. The body of James Ryder was dredged up late last night, however, and it seems that has lent credence to your otherwise unconvincing narrative.”

“Just Ryder?”

“Oh, I have every expectation of finding my sister,” he said, and she found she still had it in her to be surprised by his callousness. “We won’t be needing you for that. You may thank me for the return of your weapon and for all the paperwork. Run along home, Dr Watson. Your work here is done.”

Jo was still so very tired, and the prospect of flinging herself at his polished facade in the hope that it might crack seemed far more trouble than it was worth. She reached into the envelope to fish out the passport and boarding pass. A glossy new Oyster card was trapped in the bottom corner, and she took that as well. She looked down at the remainder: a fat stack of ten-pound notes and her gun.

It would be so very easy to take it. She could walk with purpose into a world that dared to hold Sebastian Moran and not Sherlock Holmes.

 _Moral liabilities_ , whispered the ghost of Sonia Ginzberg. Jo handed the envelope back to Mycroft.

He hadn’t expected that. She could read it in the sudden, careful blankness of his eyes. “Don’t be foolish.”

“You said it yourself,” Jo said. “My work’s done.”

“Think about what it is you’re doing.”

She had; she’d done very little in the last week but think about meeting Moran with a loaded pistol. It had been time enough to realise she couldn’t trust herself. “Correction. _I_ ’m done. Goodbye, Mr Holmes.”

She strode past him, pausing despite herself when he called after her. “I must admit I’ve begun to appreciate my sister’s uncharacteristic fixation. Leaving aside your rather hypocritical clinging to antiquated morality, there are moments when I could almost respect you.”

Jo could feel his eyes boring into her spine. “I’ll take the morals and leave the respect, thanks.”

“A pity,” he said. “You could have been so very useful.”

She left without looking back, but his words rang in her ears until her plane had landed at Heathrow.

***

Jo should probably have thought at least once about what she would do after she got back to London, but somehow the question didn’t occur to her until she was standing at the tube station, listening for the familiar rattle of the cars along the rails. It was actually quite like being discharged, except then she’d had cash in her pocket, however little, and a place to go, however bare and empty of comfort.

The doors opened and she stepped inside, leaning against one wall. She considered her options as the motion of the train hummed through her, the empty vibrations of home or something like it.

There was always Harry’s, where she had been staying just before things had gone completely mad. Except Harry would be at home by now, and neither of them was prepared for that conversation. _Coward_ , Jo thought tiredly. Scott’s and Sarah’s she discarded also. She’d burnt those bridges too thoroughly to impose at a moment’s notice.

She thought with a pang of Sherlock’s hideaway in Leamouth, where she’d left her wallet over a month and a half ago. Supposing she could find it again, supposing she could work out how to get inside, supposing it hadn’t been torn apart by Moriarty or Mycroft. She wondered whether the half-empty bottle of shampoo still sat on the edge of the sink. She wondered whether the narrow bed was still unmade, and then she stopped wondering, because she couldn’t breathe.

That was right out, then. She gave up rationalising and let her feet take her where they would, which, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be Baker Street.

Pushing aside the very reasonable thought that no-one might answer, Jo stepped up to the door and rang.

A long moment, and she shoved her fists deep in the pockets of her jacket so she could ignore the tremor in her left hand. Another moment, and then the door opened, and there was Mrs Hudson.

Jo would have expected shock, had she thought enough to expect anything. She did get a flicker of real surprise, and she waited silently as Mrs Hudson visibly pulled herself together, surprise giving way to warmth and a deep, knowing sadness.

“Oh, love—” She opened her arms.

Jo could count on one shaking hand the people with whom she’d exchanged more than passing physical contact in the last six months, and even then the ratio of life-or-death situations to comfort or affection was depressingly high. It felt like a luxury, almost, like something she shouldn’t be allowed—and then it felt like the only thing keeping her on her feet.

Some hours later, they sat at Mrs Hudson’s kitchen table. Safer there; there were fewer associations, and it smelled of tea and bacon but not at all of sulphur or embalming fluid. Jo’s mug of tea was still almost full, and neither of them had touched the biscuits.

“When was it?” Mrs Hudson asked. Jo noted her face was tanned several shades darker than usual, souvenir of her month-long cruise _gratis_ Mycroft, and wondered what she’d thought on coming home to find one of her tenants moved out and the other missing.

Jo had to swallow before she spoke. Her throat was sore, and she knew without looking that her eyes had gone red and puffy. “About a week ago.”

“You could have phoned, dear.” That should have sounded reproachful, but somehow it didn’t.

Jo sniffed wetly into a napkin, then wiped her nose. “Things were complicated.”

“Sherlock did have that way about her.” Past tense. At least one of them was accepting this gracefully. “I’ve been talking with that detective, the good-looking one Sherlock was always dragging about. He’s been worried, you know.”

“He’s had reason to be.”

“He thought you were in Afghanistan. Did you tell him that?”

“Like I said. It got complicated.” She took a sip of the tea and grimaced at finding it stone-cold. Mrs Hudson _tsked_ and took it away, getting up to flick the kettle back on and rinse out the mug.

That was at least familiar. She was unused to this Mrs Hudson, a muted version without the bright smile and the gossipy asides, but then anyone who’d rented a flat to the woman who’d ensured her husband’s execution had to be good at compartmentalising, Jo supposed. “How was it you said you met Sherlock, Mrs Hudson?”

That earned her a quick look of amusement. “Never did say, did I? That’s not a story for tonight. I’ll make you a cuppa if you’ll drink this one, and then I’ll see about making up your bed.”

“I’m not a child.” There was an ache in every bone she had.

“More’s the pity.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, they don’t expect children to give explanations, now, do they?” She set the mug back on the table, the teabag swimming in dim and milky liquid. “You rest up tonight. That detective will want to know you’re back. You’ll have quite a day of it tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Jo said, staring down into her tea. “Yes, I suppose I will.”

***

The next morning there were, as predicted, explanations to be made and statements to be signed. Someone had to explain about Moriarty and why a respected psychiatrist’s body had been found on the riverbank with a crack in her skull and the Thames in her lungs, and someone had to tell Lestrade why Sherlock hadn’t come back on that flight from Bern, and in some ways it was exactly as though she’d never left that interrogation room in Switzerland.

“I don’t believe it,” Donovan said flatly.

Jo shrugged. “Not my problem, is it?”

Donovan’s jaw tightened, and Lestrade stepped in. He’d brightened at first to see her walk in that morning, alive and whole, but that hadn’t lasted long. “You’re certain, Dr Watson.”

“She left me a note.”

“Do you have it?”

“I—no, it was typed into her phone.” She’d had it with her, but Sherlock hadn’t texted, hadn’t called. But there hadn’t been reception, she remembered that, because Jo had tried phoning the hotel with the cheap, disposable mobile they’d bought in Interlaken. “Her brother must have it. Or the Swiss authorities.”

“And Moriarty?”

“You got Sherlock’s email. You got that weeks ago. Haven’t you been looking?”

“There were a lot of names and not much in the way of proof. We’re working on it.”

“Work harder,” Jo said, and at that Donovan got up and stalked out of the room. Lestrade brought up a hand to scrub at his face.

“You need to understand,” he said. “You just up and disappeared. Both of you, without a word, and then weeks later and completely by accident we worked out the coat and shoes left in that car they pulled out of the Thames were yours. We brought your landlady in to confirm.”

Mrs Hudson hadn’t even mentioned it.

Lestrade was still talking. “We pieced it together as best we could, and what seemed likeliest was that you’d wash up on shore, too, before very long, and Sherlock knew what happened and had gone off the map to deal with it. Bloody cryptic, that email of hers, all ‘If you’re reading this, I’m not in a position to contact you directly,’ and what were we meant to do with that?

“So we looked into it, and Moriarty turned out to be a massive underground operation with money flying in all directions, but it didn’t get us any closer to working out what had happened to you and Sherlock. And, here’s the thing, Joanna—” He leant over the table, watchful and intent. “We can’t confirm, what with all the damage from water pressure, but Anderson’s got this theory the bullet-holes in that car’s windows were made from the inside.”

“They were,” she said. “My psychiatrist tried to shoot me.”

He sat back, the legs of his chair meeting the floor with a dull thud, and they just looked at one another. “Do you know the sort of pressure we’ve had in that case? She had clout, that woman, and we’ve had people from King’s College and Maudsley Hospital demanding an arrest and generally screaming bloody murder. Which we knew it was, of course, but we were assuming she’d been killed by someone trying to get at you. Are you saying she was involved?”

“Yes. Check her patient histories against that list of names Sherlock gave you. Might have to go back a few decades.”

“Damn it,” Lestrade said, and that summed it up pretty well so far as Jo was concerned. “You can’t prove anything, I suppose?”

“You can take my word for it, or not,” Jo said. “I’ll swear to it in court if you like.”

“Not as though we can prosecute her. The others, now—but we’ll come to that when we have to. It won’t go over well, though. Like I said, she had friends. At least there’s no need to bring it up before the memorial.”

“The what?”

“King’s College is honouring her tomorrow afternoon. Contributions to the field, and all that. I got an icy call from the faculty office a few days ago, saying out of respect for her memory we really ought to produce a responsible party.”

And Jo was the closest he could get, this side of the grave, but so far he’d made no move to arrest her on suspicion of murder, manslaughter, obstructing the investigation, or anything else for which she might possibly be charged. Which was good, of course, but Jo couldn’t quite manage to feel relieved. “I suppose you’ll want a statement on Ginzberg, too.”

“If you would.”

“Not as though I’ve got anything else on,” Jo said, and if his eyes lingered worriedly on her as he got up to fetch a transcriptionist, at least he refrained from further comment.

***

No doubt it was confirmation of the masochistic streak Harry’d always accused her of having, but the next afternoon she showed up at King’s College dressed in the most tasteful, memorial-appropriate outfit she owned. Somewhat to her irritation, this had meant resorting to the clothing Mycroft had provided for her the day she’d turned up in hospital with her sister’s blood all down her front, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Jo floated through the eulogies, listening to people in suits and the very particular sort of eyeglasses medical men of a certain age seemed to favour talk about Ginzberg’s contributions to her field. Representatives from King’s, representatives from Maudsley, and then a quietly well-spoken man who turned out to be her widower.

Jo had known from the first that he’d existed, had heard Sherlock’s assertion that Ginzberg had married a former patient and her speculation on which category of her psychiatric interests he’d represented, but she’d never given any thought to the reality of the man. She wondered if he’d known what his wife did when she wasn’t treating patients—what she did, occasionally, _while_ she was treating patients. Jo should never have come.

Afterward there were drinks and the sort of finger foods familiar from the better-funded variety of faculty events at any university. Jo got herself some coffee but didn’t drink it, and the thought of food made her gut do unpleasant things.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Jo turned to see a woman at her shoulder. Her face had a hazy sort of familiarity about it. “My daughter says she knows you.”

Jo was about to say that seemed unlikely, but then her eyes fell to the girl at the woman’s side, and a quiet chill closed around her heart. “Maddy Parsons,” she said. The girl shrank back against her mother. “What are you doing here?”

Terribly rude of her, but the words fell out of their own volition, and the mother didn’t seem to notice. “We’re so terribly sorry about Dr Ginzberg.”

“You knew her?”

“Maddy was seeing her. After the kidnapping, you know, but she’s doing much better now,” Elizabeth Parsons said all in a rush, as though Jo had been about to say otherwise. “She’s doing very well. You’re Joanna Watson, the one who found her?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Jo said, because it hadn’t been. And now, like then, Maddy said nothing at all.

Parsons appeared not to notice this, either. “Were you a friend?”

“A friend?”

“Of Sonia Ginzberg’s.”

Who had treated Maddy Parsons after using the child to orchestrate her uncle’s suicide. “How did you find her?” Jo asked hoarsely.

“She approached us through the police. Offered her services for free, you know. She was wonderful with trauma victims, and she helped Maddy more than you can imagine,” she said. She clutched her daughter’s hand with desperate determination. “Really she did, even in that short time. It’s been such a shock.”

The girl stared up at Jo, her wide eyes impenetrable.

“Trauma victims,” Jo repeated. “Excuse me.”

She shoved the coffee onto the nearest level surface and fled. She’d seen the women’s toilets on her way in, thank God, and made it there without any false starts; as she hunched over a porcelain bowl and heaved, some cold and removed part of her observed that at least she now had reason to be grateful for her poor appetite.

It was over quickly. She leant unsteadily against the tiled wall and breathed.

Someone knocked at the door of the stall. “Are you all right?”

She knew that voice, but just now she couldn’t place it. “Fine,” Jo called, pushing one hand across her sweat-slicked face.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll wait to see for myself.” The woman sounded calm and reasonable, and Jo wanted to scream.

Instead she pulled a length of tissue from the toilet roll, wiped her mouth until it hurt, and flushed. Then she unlocked the door.

“Joanna,” said the woman outside, vaguely surprised.

“Ella,” Jo replied. “But you’re meant to be in Edinburgh.”

“And I came back for a colleague’s memorial,” said her first therapist. She was still calm and reasonable, but now with a thin layer of caution over it all. “How have you been, Joanna?”

 _Vomiting in a public loo, how do you think?_ Jo almost said, but she caught it in time, because Ella Thompson was not an idiot. “Busy,” she did say, because surely being kidnapped and shot at, fleeing for her life across international borders, and being interrogated by Swiss authorities constituted an active lifestyle.

“And how is Sherlock?”

“Oh, you know,” Jo said. Her voice sounded brittle and too bright, and surely Ella would notice. “Busy.”

“I see.” A dubious pause. “Did you get on well with Sonia?”

A bubble of hysteria threatened to rise up in Jo’s throat, but she tamped it down ruthlessly. “She certainly knew what she was doing.” Jo wouldn’t, couldn’t do this just now. “Good to see you.”

“Joanna—”

“Got to leave, sorry. Keeping Sherlock waiting, and you know that’s never a good idea.”

“Are you—” But Jo was already in the hall, and she pushed blindly through the quiet clots of mourners between her and the door.

It was cool and damp outside, and she just stood for a long moment, feeling the light mist against her face as she waited for her stomach and her hand to settle. It was several minutes before she noticed that not only had that sleek black car been parked there the whole time, but the suited driver was standing patiently, holding the rear door open for her.

Bloody fantastic.

She considered walking away, but that would only prolong the inevitable. Jo slid into the seat beside Mycroft Holmes, her stiff back relaxing the moment it hit the expensive and ergonomically-sound cushions.

“Hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said.

“When you try my patience, Dr Watson, I’ll be sure to let you know. I hope you won’t consider it forward if I observe that grey cashmere suits you.” The car pulled out into traffic. “I must say I hadn’t expected you to come here.”

“You know how it is,” Jo said. “When you kill your psychiatrist, it’s just good manners to show up at the memorial.”

He gave her the careful chuckle he’d probably developed in secret meetings with cabinet members and foreign heads of state. “You are a remarkable woman.”

Jo laughed. It hurt her throat. “The last few times we’ve met, I’ve been at rock bottom.”

“My point exactly. Though to be accurate, I’d say rock bottom in this case was approximately…ten minutes ago?”

Perversely, she found herself wishing he _had_ been there. Being sick all over Mycroft Holmes’ very expensive shoes would have been horrifying, but she thought the attendant satisfaction might be enough to make up for it.

“It was good of you to come collect me yourself,” she said. “That assistant of yours have better things to do?”

“Why do you resent me?”

He seemed genuinely curious. She shrugged. “You’re an arrogant arsehole who gets off on meddling in other people’s lives. You’re a bureaucrat who can send soldiers off to die without scuffing the shine on your shoes. Your hands are too soft, and I don’t like your tie. Take your pick, really.”

He smiled, lips pulling back against twin rows of tidy, narrow teeth, and she turned away to stare out the window. It had started to drizzle, validating the bone-deep ache in her shoulder. She watched for a few long moments as heavy drops crept haltingly down the glass.

“They’ve found a body,” he said into her silence.

She’d known, somehow, she realised distantly. Sherlock would have scoffed if she’d called it intuition, so Jo settled on a leap of logic, and she turned to look back at Mycroft Holmes with what she thought was admirable composure under the circumstances. “Will she be repatriated?”

“It’s already done.”

Of course. He wouldn’t be back in the country if he hadn’t finished the business that had kept him in Switzerland, and he certainly wouldn’t have come by for a chat with Joanna Watson if he’d anything more important at hand. “Will there be a funeral?”

“Saturday afternoon, in Golders Green. She requested cremation. I’ll send my assistant with a car, if I may.”

“No need.”

“As you like.” The car pulled smoothly up to the kerb outside the flat, and Jo reached for the handle. “My condolences, Dr Watson.”

She gave him a brusque nod and left. It didn’t occur to her until she was halfway up the seventeen steps to the sitting room that sympathy should probably have been offered the other way around. Odd, but then that was hardly the oddest thing about Mycroft Holmes, and she didn’t waste time speculating on what it meant.


	2. The Women Concerned in the Case

The morning is bright and Paris is beautiful, though Jo’s opinion has probably been influenced by two days in close quarters and near-total dark. Sherlock has deemed it safe to travel openly, so long as they are inconspicuous and keep their wits about them, and it is the first time Jo’s had the prospect of a decent meal since well before they left London.

They’re sitting at a cafe out on a sun-drenched street, and Jo could almost believe this is a real holiday if it wasn’t for the fierce debate they’ve just had over who would sit with her back to the wall.

“I’m the one with the gun.”

“You could give it to me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know what to watch for. Would you recognise one of Moriarty’s men at fifty metres?”

“I’d recognise an attack, and that’s what I’m worried about.”

“You’ll get us both killed. I think we’ve established my superior observational abilities, or are you still in doubt?”

“And I think we’ve also established I’ve got my own areas of expertise. Such as, for example, actual combat experience.”

“Remind me again how that turned out.”

“Stop sulking and enjoy your meal.”

Sherlock is not enjoying her meal. She is ignoring an excellent bowl of something Jo can’t pronounce and eyeing the street via the reflective glass of the cafe’s window, which irritates Jo just a bit, and all the while she looks as though she’s thinking very hard. This is unusual. Sherlock is always thinking, of course, but usually when she’s doing it she looks as though she’s half asleep.

“What?” Jo asks eventually.

Sherlock’s eyes dart sideways, settling on Jo with something that looks very like reluctance. “You should have stayed in London.”

“I’d have been shot in London.”

“Mycroft would have prevented it.”

“You hate asking your brother for favours.”

“I’ll hate it worse if you’re killed by sniper fire on this little excursion.” Her voice curls unpleasantly around the words.

“You didn’t sound so reluctant when I told you I wanted to come,” Jo points out.

“That was before—”

“Before what?”

“Mycroft’s been in touch.”

“How?” So far as Jo’s seen, Sherlock hasn’t had the opportunity to contact anyone for days.

“Personals.” Sherlock jerks her head at the papers they picked up at an international news-stand that morning. “ ‘Missed connection outside the veteran’s hospital - I was the bright-haired woman with the BlackBerry, you were the grey-haired man with the sharp eyes and the tiger-lily in your buttonhole. Would love to get to know you; perhaps a European weekend is in order?’ “ She shakes her head. “Moran has left the country.”

“But he can’t know where we are just yet,” Jo says reasonably. “You left about half a dozen false trails behind us.” And, when this does nothing to smooth the crease in her friend’s forehead: “Sherlock. Look at me.” She does, reluctantly. “Do you trust me to have your back?” Literally, in this case.

“Of course.” Now that sounds more like Sherlock, and Jo takes “…you idiot” as read. Wary glances notwithstanding, Sherlock would not have caved on the issue of their seating arrangements otherwise.

“Then trust me not to get myself killed.”

Sherlock does not exactly relax, after that, but she does eventually deign to sample the food. Jo approves. No point in running off to France if you’re not going to eat anything.

 

***

 

 **Chapter Two:** The Women Concerned in the Case

 

When it came to family reconciliation, she’d always been prone to crap timing, but the alternative was sitting around the flat trying to work out how she could ever apologise to Mrs Hudson until Saturday afternoon arrived. Jo Watson had never been one to prefer slow stagnation to a fiery crash and burn.

It didn’t occur to her until she was actually on Harry’s doorstep that she should have rung first. The spare keys had survived a wetting in the river far better than Harry’s mobile had, and somehow she’d kept them with her all through their mad dash into the continent, their slight weight an occasional reminder of what exactly she’d done getting herself to that point. Now they jangled restlessly in her hand as she turned them over, and over again, staring up at the sleek block of flats her sister called home.

In the end, she pocketed the keys and rang the buzzer instead.

“Watson residence,” said a woman’s voice. It was not Harry’s.

“This is Jo,” she said. She had prepared herself for immediate confrontation and was thrown to find herself addressing a total stranger. “Joanna. Watson, I mean.”

“Her sister?”

“Yes. Is she—”

“I’ll buzz you right up.” The door clicked, and a little light on the handle flashed green for _Go_. Jo took a long breath and went.

She was met at the door by a pretty young thing who looked terribly, pathetically eager to see her.

“She’s in the bath,” she said before Jo could get a word out. “I’ll be helping her out in a minute. She still has trouble getting leverage. I’m so glad you’re here.”

Jo took the hand she offered and tried to think what to ask first. “How _old_ are you?” would have been a terrible way to start, though she couldn’t help reflecting that if Harry was aiming for cliché, she could hardly have chosen better. “Who are you?” she asked instead, which might have been brusque but seemed reasonable under the circumstances.

“Rebecca,” said the young woman. “I—”

She was cut off by a voice from down the hall and the sloshing of water in a tub. “Is someone there?”

“Joanna,” Rebecca said, “your sister. She—”

A violent splash, and the sound of something falling onto tile. “Like _hell_ she is!”

Rebecca was already halfway down the hall, Jo right behind her.

“What makes her think she can come into my home?” They opened the door to see Harry half standing, half sitting as she clutched the side of the tub, one hand raised to grasp the grab bar that had been installed sometime since Jo had been there last. Bath-water had spilt out onto the floor, and several bottles of hair product had fallen from the shelf.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Rebecca said in alarm, darting forward to catch Harry under the arm.

Harry was having none of it. “Get the fuck out of here.” She twisted away, and the younger woman flinched. “Not you, _her_.” She stabbed one finger at Jo, nearly losing her balance. “You think you can just walk back in here?”

“She’s right, Harry,” Jo said. “Sit back down before you slip.”

“And you’d care about that, would you?” She’d lost weight, no surprise, and the scars from the surgery that had repaired her punctured lung and perforated blood vessels stood out red and angry against her pale, slippery skin. “What’s it to you if I end up back in hospital? You’ll just leave the fucking country before I’m even discharged.”

“Harry,” Rebecca said, an unexpected resolve in her voice, and to Jo’s utter astonishment Harry actually relaxed into her grip. The girl at least knew what she was doing. She looked up at Jo. “I think you’d better go.”

“Right,” Jo said. “I’m—God, I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure which of them that was meant for, but Rebecca gave her a grim nod, and Jo backed out before she could make things any worse. She closed the door on Harry’s “And don’t even _think_ of coming back!” and stood in the hall, breathing hard, until her leg would support her weight long enough to get her out to the street.

***

Saturday, and Mrs Hudson came to knock at her door around one. Jo looked up from buttoning the grey cashmere cardigan, because it was still the nicest thing she owned, and in the battle of dignity against practicality there was really no contest. The better part of Jo was still a soldier, after all.

“All right, love?” Mrs Hudson asked.

“All right.” Jo pushed a hand through her hair. It had got long enough to be bothersome again. She would have to see about that. Not that she had the cash at the moment—come Monday she’d ring the pension office. No point putting it off any longer.

The service was held at a crematorium off Finchley Road, a staid and monstrously impressive sort of place where the air felt heavier under the weight of red brick and Significance. Jo had been to her share of funerals, and this one was almost perplexing in its familiarity, all “blessed are those who mourn” and “like a shadow we flee” and “dust to dust”. She’d fastened the cardigan and the shirt underneath all the way up to her chin, and she had to unbutton a bit under the stifling formality before they’d even got to the committal. (Though they’d already done the cremation, which wasn’t at all usual, was it? Look, there was the urn just sitting there, damn ugly too, looked like the sort of thing you’d grab to brain someone with, and that would be all kinds of appropriate, come to think of it—maybe she should just take a swing at the minister with his dull, passionless voice, and they could all end the afternoon with a nice murder.)

It was a small turnout, but larger than she’d expected. Lestrade sat on the other side of Mrs Hudson, no surprise there, but Donovan’s presence _was_ unexpected, though her face was set in the sort of grimace Jo had last seen as a medic when observing the effects of rigour mortis. Mycroft Holmes sat across the aisle, his assistant beside him looking almost human, for once, reduced by the absence of her BlackBerry. They wore matching expressions of studied, bland solemnity.

It took her until the dismissal to recognise several of the others. Angelo, of course, had nodded to her before the service began, but that was Paul Seomun in the far corner and the woman who’d restored Sherlock’s violin a few seats away. She tried to place the rest as they all stood and began shuffling around—was there any social situation as ridiculous as a funeral?—and failed, but by the fact that none of them approached Mycroft with condolences she assumed they were professional rather than familial acquaintances.

Mycroft himself made his way over to Jo, the umbrella at his side swinging in perfect time to each precise click of his shoes.

“Wouldn’t have thought she’d want a religious service,” Jo heard herself say.

He smiled blandly. “Funerals are in memory of the dead, but it is the living who attend them. There is something to be said for the comfort of tradition, don’t you think?”

“Sherlock wasn’t much for empty comfort.”

“So we must take it where we can. ‘We look for the fullness of the resurrection’,” he quoted with a piety that surprised her. “Do take care, Dr Watson.”

“My sympathies for your loss,” she said mechanically. She turned away to find Mrs Hudson and the exit, and in her haste she nearly tripped over Bill Murray, the nurse she’d last seen in person while she was floating into hypovolaemic shock.

She stared. He hadn’t changed much at all—less tanned, maybe, but as broad-shouldered and deceptively solemn-faced as ever. “What are you doing here?”

“Fine way to welcome an old mate,” he said, and she reached in for a quick, back-pounding hug. God, that was easy. She’d forgotten how easy people could be. He held her out at arm’s length, frowning. “You stopped writing in that blog.”

“Nothing to write about.”

“Tried phoning you, but the number’s been disconnected.”

“I’ve been out of the country.”

“And Harry swore at me and said you’d left on another tour, which I told her was complete shite, but she didn’t know anything else except she’d been _shot_ , Jo, and I knew you’d never have pulled a runner after that without a good reason.” He gave her shoulders a firm shake and let her go.

“You’ve been talking to Harry?”

“ _I_ get on just fine with Harry. We talk.”

“So you’ve met Rebecca,” Jo said, trying to keep her tone neutral.

“Introduced them, didn’t I? I worked with her a few months back while she was finishing her RNA. Good kid, I knew they’d get on. But we were talking about how you’d gone off the grid. Not _on_ , Watson. So I’ve been stalking you.”

“What?” Now she was smiling at him. She couldn’t help it, even at a funeral, but Bill had always been that way.

“Googling,” he said. It was all she could do not to laugh aloud. “And there was nothing. So the other day I tried that friend of yours, and look what I found. Thought you might have got yourself killed, too.”

“It happens,” she said.

He shrugged, watching her carefully. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He clearly didn’t want her to do anything of the sort, but he was at least willing to make the effort. Never let it be said that Bill Murray lacked for courage. “No,” she said, “I want to get so pissed I can’t shoot straight.”

He grinned in relief, sudden and bright as the sunrise. “You? There’s not enough alcohol in London.”

“We’ll see about that.”

So they did. More quickly than Jo had expected, too; after her discharge, she’d had any number of reasons to avoid large quantities of alcohol, and she still hadn’t grown accustomed to the effect a changed metabolism would have on her tolerance. It started well enough, she supposed, with cheerful _Do you remember when?_ s and stories swapped by means of the shorthand people develop after long months of working in close quarters, and before long it wasn’t even an effort not to think of anything that had happened since her injury. Then, though she wasn’t sure exactly how, everything devolved into a reeling grey mess.

***

She was sitting in her therapist’s office. “It’s not working,” she said, though she couldn’t for the life of her remember what they were talking about.

“You might need to try harder,” Ginzberg said, her glasses casting an odd shadow over her face.

“I am trying. I don’t want to be so _easy_.”

Jo’s ring tone went off. “Ignore that.” Something dark and wet had begun to drip down Ginzberg’s cheeks and forehead.

“I should take this,” she said, watching in fascination as great clots of water came rolling out of Ginzberg’s mouth.

“I wouldn’t,” the other woman said, but it was important or Sherlock would never have rung. Jo looked down, and the name on the screen wasn’t Sherlock’s after all. The stark white letters read _Janus Cars_.

She raised the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“What’s she done now?” demanded the gruff voice of Sebastian Moran, the sniper she’d heard but never seen.

“You’re a dead man,” she told him calmly.

He laughed in her ear. “Still have some fight in you? There’s no point in trying, you know. We’re still in the interval, and you’re just filling in for the leading lady.”

“You never said that,” she said, confused now. “That was Jim Ryder.” She could still smell the chlorine.

His next words were drowned in the roar of static or falling water, and Jo killed the bad connection. The phone rang again almost immediately, but this time it read _Mycroft Holmes_. Ginzberg coughed politely.

Jo stared uncertainly at the name on the screen until her eye was caught by flash of red hair, darkened and dripping with the Thames. Of course, she’d made this appointment to talk about Valerie Hammond, whom Scott had loved so much that he’d drowned her. _No_ , Jo thought. That wasn’t right. She raised her head to ask Ginzberg and found herself staring down the barrel of her own gun—but it wasn’t Ginzberg at all.

It was Sherlock.

Her curls were drawn long and straight by the weight of the water, her face was whiter even than usual, and her queer blue eyes were clouded over.

“I’ve been very stupid, haven’t I?” Jo heard herself say.

The phone rang again.

Sherlock smiled, and then she pulled the trigger.

***

Jo started awake, heart pounding like a drum salute, and found her arms and legs pinned to her sides.

Pure fury took over before she could process this— _not again_ , she thought, and if she had to kill someone this time she wasn’t going to waste any effort regretting it. She struck out with everything she had and discovered her bonds gave hardly any resistance; her eyes snapped open, and she found she was lying on her side in a dim room, a thick duvet tucked around her and a glass of water sitting on the bedside table.

She sat up a little too quickly. The room spun around her and her stomach roiled, and she clenched her teeth against the nausea until it faded. By that time she’d recognised her surroundings, and it occurred to her that a nice simple abduction might have been preferable.

The smell of coffee wafted in from outside. She pushed the duvet away, noted she was wearing a T-shirt (not hers) and knickers (hers, thank God) and nothing else, and slid with some care onto the hardwood floor. Her leg trembled as it took her weight, and by the time she made it down the hall she had to keep one hand to the wall to stay upright.

The kitchen was far too bright, all wide windows and white tile and stainless steel. Jo squinted into the light, her head beginning to pound, and tried to focus on the figure standing at the stove.

“How the righteous have fallen.” Harry’s tone was bland, which meant she was amused, which meant this might not be the utter disaster Jo had feared. “Coffee, or will you be sprinting for the toilet?”

“Don’t think so,” Jo said around the foul taste in her mouth. “Coffee. And—” The bottle of paracetamol hit her squarely in the abdomen. Her reflexes hadn’t deserted her entirely, because she did manage to catch it before it hit the ground. “Cheers.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Jo dry-swallowed two pills on her way to the counter. She accepted a mug of too-hot coffee with hands that weren’t as steady as she’d have liked. It burnt her tongue and palate going down, but the pain was as good as the caffeine, and after the first swallow she already felt more alert.

Though not, perhaps, enough to manage this conversation. It would’ve been nice to be more thoroughly clothed.

She eyed Harry over the rim of her mug. The weight and colour her sister had dropped gave her the deceptive appearance of fragility, and the sunlight picked out the hollows of her face with brutal clarity. She looked—brittle.

“Bill bring me back?” Jo asked, tentative.

“He was just about legless. In better shape than you, though, which was just as well,” Harry said. “I’m not one for heavy lifting these days. You don’t remember any of it?”

She could piece bits of it together, but it didn’t seem worth the effort involved. “Some. Did—was it Bill who undressed me?”

Harry grinned wickedly. “I did the honours, but someone had to prop you up. Turned his head away, though, which meant he’d rather have been watching. You should have married that one.”

Speaking of utter disasters. “He’s already got a wife.”

“He didn’t while you were in Afghanistan. Learn to strike while the iron’s hot, Jo.”

“And how _is_ Rebecca?” Jo asked tartly.

Harry gave her a curious look, as though she didn’t see how this followed. “It’s her day off.”

“Her what?”

“Sunday, isn’t it? I can phone if there’s an emergency, which there won’t be, I’m fine. But you can’t expect her to work through the week. You know me, I’d drive anyone mad without some time away.” Harry wore her most self-deprecating grin, but it faded as the look on Jo’s face sank in. “What did you think I meant?”

“I—”

“You thought I was sleeping with her,” Harry said, the dawning outrage somewhat stifled by disbelief. “You really thought—she’s barely out of school, Jo! As a _nurse_.” Which Bill had actually told her. God, if Sherlock was here. She’d have given Jo hell for missing the obvious. A month an a half after an injury like that, Harry was still weak and extremely limited in her range of motion—unlikely to recover all of it, Jo’s professional eye concluded ruthlessly—and she lived alone now. Of course she’d have hired someone.

Harry was looking at her like something she wanted to scrape off her shoe. “Of all the self-righteous—did you miss the part where I got shot, Jo? That I might be needing to deal with that? Or didn’t the thought cross your mind while you were haring off to God-knows-where—”

“Why did you think I left?” Jo demanded, grappling in vain for the moral high ground. “I was trying to protect you, and I didn’t know how else to do it.”

“Oh, well done, Jo. _Smashing_ job on that front.”

“I—” No good, she couldn’t win this one. It was a forfeit even to try. Jo shook her head and exhaled. “You’re right. I’m sorry. About Rebecca—stupid of me, and wouldn’t have been my business anyway. And for the rest of it. It was a mess, Harry, and I thought I was doing the best I could, but I should have done better by you.”

Harry had gone quiet during this speech. Her mouth was a grim line, but she acknowledged the apology with a jerk of her head, deflating just a bit. “So long as you don’t take it for another reason to self-flagellate. It gets old, you know.”

Jo almost smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“All right.” Not that it was, at all.

After a strained moment of silence, Harry went to top up her coffee with a determination Jo recognised as her own, when she needed something to do with her hands and an excuse to look away. Jo took several long, slow sips, the better to give them both the space they needed.

Harry over-poured, and the coffee lapped over the side of the mug. Harry made an abortive attempt to reach for it with her bad hand and changed it at the last moment into an awkward shuffling of mug and cafetiere that nearly ended in shattered ceramic, but she caught herself just in time. Jo recognised this, too, and made no move to help.

Harry muttered something Jo couldn’t quite catch, then stood back from the counter, her face unreadable. “I could have used you, you know?” She glared down at the mug. “The hospital wasn’t bad, I suppose. At least I knew they’d let me out. But I didn’t expect this to take so _long_.”

“Are you still sober?” Jo asked quietly.

Harry glanced at her, and Jo thought this might have been a misstep, but in the end she just shrugged. “It was touch and go for a bit, there, but yeah. It helped that I couldn’t do the shopping myself, right at the beginning. I’ve had to cut everything down. Even now, it’s like I’ve only got half my life, and the rest of it is aches and cold sweats and being stuck in a body that doesn’t want to work and having to go to physical therapy. Which is hell, in case you were wondering.”

“It’ll get worse,” Jo said. “And then it’ll get better.” Her hand went instinctively to her scar, and then a reluctant grin tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“What?”

“At least we’ve finally got something in common.” Harry stared, and then she snorted, and Jo giggled, and then they both dissolved into helpless, heaving laughter. If it was edged with desperation, neither of them seemed to mind.

Jo laughed until her leg wouldn’t hold her up. She slid to the floor, the kitchen island at her back and the tiles smooth and cool against her bare skin, and barely noticed when Harry joined her, because the pressure in her throat had been building and the laughter had turned to sobs before she could stop it. Horrible, racking sobs, the sort she’d learnt to stifle years ago. She pulled in on herself, knees drawn up to her chest as the breath tore in and out.

She settled eventually into soggy, childish gasps, and even these subsided at length. She permitted her sister to tuck an arm behind her and let her head fall back against the cupboard doors.

Harry reached up to brush damp strands of hair out of Jo’s face. “Who was it that killed her?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I can hunt down the bastard that made my sister cry.”

That undid her again, and this time she let herself lean into Harry’s good side, not even bothering to pretend she could hold herself up.

“You’re too late,” she said between wet sniffles, once she could get the words out.

“Did you get there first?”

It was an awfully calm way for Harry to ask whether her sister was a cold-blooded killer. Lingering judgement on Jo’s choice of career, or was the precise nature of her months-long battle with rage and self-doubt that obvious? “Wasn’t me,” she said. “They went down together.”

Harry _hmm_ ed at this, and Jo felt the vibration of it in her chest. “Was he the one that shot me?”

A fair question. Bad enough to be a casualty in a war of your own choosing, like Sherlock, or into which you’d been more-or-less drafted, like Jo. Worse still if neither the escalation nor the outcome had anything to do with you and none of the players would give you the courtesy of an explanation. “No,” Jo said shortly, then sighed. “No, that one’s still alive. I think.” Odd, to think she’d never even met the man. “But not here.”

“Is it over, then?”

Not while Mycroft was still at it, and not while Scotland Yard was still scrambling for evidence, and not so long as Sebastian Moran was breathing. But that wasn’t the right answer.

“Yes,” Jo said with all the firmness she could muster. “Far as I’m concerned.” She almost made herself believe it.

“Good.” They sat in silence for a long while after.

She rang Bill that afternoon from Harry’s sleek new phone, an even more recent model than the last.

“You owe me forty quid in cab fare,” he said before she could get a word in edgewise.

“Bit steep for Greenwich, isn’t it?”

“Had to get you to Harry’s first, didn’t I? And then I wasn’t in a fit state to be counting change.”

“I don’t doubt it. My apologies to the missus.”

“Already given. You’ve got to meet her one of these days.”

“Invite her along next time. I promise to behave.”

“Sounds dull,” he said. “I didn’t—look, I wouldn’t have dumped you at Harry’s if I’d known where else to take you. I didn’t know you two were still on the outs. Er, any more than usual. I ran off at the mouth a bit, didn’t realise she hadn’t even heard about the funeral.”

“Not your fault.”

“Still, if I’ve gone and put my foot in it, leaving you there—”

“Shut it, Murray,” Jo said. “It’s no good saving a girl’s arse as well as her life if you’re going to get all apologetic over it.”

She could actually hear his grin down the line. “Knight in shining armour, that’s me.”

“And don’t I know it. Seriously, Bill, thank you.”

“Things all right over there?”

She glanced over to the kitchen table, where Harry was attempting to set out lunch more-or-less one-handed, swearing expressively under her breath all the while. “Yeah,” she said, smiling a little. “Yeah, we’re good.”

***

Good meant boring. Good meant tentative steps toward normalcy, whatever that was. It meant fixing some of the things she’d broken and trying not to think too hard about the ones that were shattered beyond hope. It meant forgetting about murder investigations so she could remember to do the shopping, until the day she came home to see a marked police care parked outside 221 Baker Street.

Jo walked up the steps to the sound of people talking in the kitchen. The voices resolved into Mrs Hudson’s and Lestrade’s, and by the time Jo joined them at the table she’d prepared herself for a conversation she didn’t want to have.

“Hello,” she said. Lestrade raised his mug in greeting. “Just stopped in to chat?”

“No. I need you to come by and listen to something. Are you free this evening?” he asked, and his tone said he’d really rather she was, as if she refused he might have to reissue the invitation in stronger language.

“I’ve given a statement already,” Jo said.

“I know,” he said. “We need another.”

He met her eyes steadily, and when she nodded he swallowed the last of his tea and led her away.

“Sit down,” he said. They were in a side office that, with the door closed, was about as quiet as it got at Scotland Yard. A large window stretched across one wall, though the room beyond was cut off by blinds. Sally Donovan was there, though she gave no indication of recognition other than a brief nod. With her were a female plainclothes officer and a male sergeant in uniform, both unfamiliar. They watched Jo with care.

“What is this?” Jo asked.

“Identity parade,” said Lestrade. He gestured at the woman. “DI Hopkins will be conducting it.”

Jo’s stomach began jumping unpleasantly. “Have you made an arrest?”

“Yes, based on Sherlock’s evidence, but this will help us in court. We might not even need to call you to the stand. Now, you never saw any of the people Sherlock named, but you heard their voices. What we want is for you to listen to these recordings. If you recognise any of them, we’ll have you sign a statement swearing to it.”

“And that,” said Hopkins, “is more than you ought to say. There’s a reason I’m taking this one. Don’t want you corrupting the witness, do we?”

Lestrade shook his head. He looked reluctant. “Come on, Donovan.”

Hopkins cleared her throat as the door closed behind them. “You will hear a number of people speaking,” she said, as though she’d said it a hundred times before. Which she probably had. “Please say nothing until you have heard them all. If you wish, you may hear them again. The woman who you overheard discussing the Moriarty organisation this March may not be here: but if you recognise her voice, tell me her number. Got all that?”

Jo nodded.

“All right, then.” The sergeant took out his notebook. Hopkins stood and went to the window, where a touchpad and speaker were set into the wall. She pushed a button. “Number one, please.”

There was a short burst of static, and then there came a woman’s voice: cultured, precise, and totally unfamiliar. Her words, on the other hand, Jo could identify with ease. “Who is this? How did you get my number?” A pause, and then the same voice again: “No names, then. I’ve said this was foolishness from the start. You’ll have to do it. Don’t waste time.”

The phrases were all straight from Jo’s signed statement. She knew the content to be reasonably accurate—Sherlock had drilled her over and over again on the snatches of conversation she’d caught between Ginzberg and Moriarty’s other members, and she’d been confident enough to reproduce some of it for Lestrade—but the voice wasn’t quite right. The accent was close enough, the age about the same, from what she could tell, but no doubt that was deliberate.

Still, it had been almost two months. What were the odds she’d remember well enough to make an identification?

Hopkins didn’t even look at her. “Number two,” she said.

“Who is this?” Same accent, same approximate age. Still, nothing. Though they wouldn’t have put the suspect on first, would they? Or would they leave her for last? Or—useless to speculate, the order might well be random, and she didn’t want to prejudice herself. And the woman might not even be there. What if she pointed her finger in the wrong direction, had the wrong woman arrested—but no, they wouldn’t build a whole case on an identity parade, and after all Sherlock had given names. But what if—

Jo clenched her teeth and listened.

The third voice moved her not at all. There was another brief silence, another flare of static, and then—

“Who is this?”

Jo went still. Doubt and anxiety both fled her, leaving only a cold inner silence. Auditory memory intact, apparently.

She had to keep herself from looking at Hopkins or the sergeant. Corrupting the witness, and all that.

She sat quietly through two more statements, and only then did Hopkins turn to look at her. “Would you like to hear them all again? All right. Did you recognise any of those voices?”

“Yes.” She swallowed. “Number four.”

“And where have you heard that voice?”

“Like you said before. On the telephone with Sonia Ginzberg, back in March. I overheard her discussing Moriarty.”

“Are you certain it was the same voice?”

“Much as I can be.” That same doubt, again, and she could almost hear Sherlock in her ear giving statistics on the accuracy of human memory. “It sounded just like her.”

Hopkins nodded. “Thank you, Dr Watson. The sergeant here will take your statement.”

“But who is she?”

Hopkins returned the question with a bland look. “I really can’t say.”

***

Her name was Margaret Kempe, and she was a theoretical mathematician from Cambridge. Jo should probably not have been allowed to see her, but she knew dozens of Yarders by name. It was Sally Donovan who let her in. Her frown looked like it had been etched into her face, and she offered Jo no word of greeting, but the swift look she gave as she opened the door was that of a comrade in arms.

Kempe had square glasses, smooth skin, and cropped hair that curled tight against her scalp. Jo sat opposite her and tried to place her features, but no, they’d never have had any reason to meet. Kempe returned this scrutiny without any particular stirrings of interest. Then she blinked, her eyes narrowing. “You’re Joanna Watson.” Jo gave her a curt nod. “I’ve been hearing all about you. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I want you to tell me where I can find Sebastian Moran.”

“I have no idea who that is.”

“Very clever. Have you thought of co-operating? I’m sure they could arrange a lighter sentence.”

“By what authority could you promise that?”

“None at all,” Jo admitted readily, “but I know they’d love the inside information.”

“I’ll take it as assumed that Moran is yet another of the people with whom I’m meant to have formed a vast criminal conspiracy. If that’s so, I can’t imagine why you’d think he would keep me apprised of his movements. Key members dead, arrests made, names flying about—I think it’s very likely the leaders of this Moriarty organisation have gone to ground. It’s much safer if the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Merely from observation and sound judgement, I assure you. My field gives one an appreciation for the larger picture.”

“Is that what you did for Moriarty? It would’ve countered Ryder’s obsessions, I suppose. Like the two Holmes siblings.”

“Dr Watson, I assure you I haven’t the slightest idea who you’re talking about.” She had a cruel, catlike smile a little like Sherlock’s. The comparison made Jo catch her breath. “If that was an attempt to goad me into a confession, I expected better. Which puts me in mind of a question of my own. When are _you_ planning to confess?”

Jo jerked up her chin. “What am I meant to have done?”

“The murder of Sonia Ginzberg, of course. She’s an association I won’t deny. I’ve no reason to.”

“That wasn’t murder. She had a gun to my back.”

“So you’ve said, as I gather. But you got out of that car, and she was the one they buried.” Kempe leant forward until they could have touched if they’d wanted to. “I’ve gathered more than that. I hear you lost a friend this spring. Did it hurt, Joanna Watson? How would you quantify your grief?”

Jo’s hand was shaking. This was not the way the conversation should have gone. “Why do you care? Where does that fit in your larger picture?”

“It doesn’t,” Kempe said. “I confess it’s very small of me. I relish the thought of your pain, Joanna Watson, because you killed Sonia Ginzberg.”

“What’s it to you?” Jo asked, her throat constricted.

Kempe’s eyes smouldered with buried grief. “I loved her dearly.”

“So did I,” Jo said, and left while she could still stand.

“All right?” Donovan asked in the hall outside. Jo was hunched over, rubbing at her thigh.

“I wish to hell everyone would stop asking me that.”

“Get anything out of her?”

“No. I don’t think I really thought I would. I just—it was important to see her. And stupid.”

“Apparently,” Donovan said. “Better leave it to us now. Need a lift home?”

“No.” She’d do. The ache was already fading. Damn that leg.

“Fine. Listen, don’t take this the wrong way.”

“What?”

Donovan gave her a hard, assessing look. “I hope I don’t see you again for a long time.”

Jo managed a grim smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”


	3. A Practical Man of Affairs

”You need to tell me about Ginzberg.”

Jo tenses.

Sherlock notices this. It’s Sherlock, so she would anyway, but trapped together in a space where neither of them can quite stand upright or stretch their arms, she’d have to be awfully thick to miss it. “I’m not about to attack you,” she says crossly.

The armoured van lurches around a corner, throwing them both to one side in a flurry of elbows and knees. Jo makes an addition to her mental tally of bruises. She has quite a collection by now. Her poor, poor abused back. Priorities, though—she puts up a hand to check that the cash boxes stacked beside them are secure. They’ve made it too far just to be crushed by falling currency.

“I’ve told you all about Ginzberg,” she says once they’ve braced themselves again. They must be in Switzerland by now. Jo hopes. “I’ve told you everything she said.”

“Everything about Moran,” Sherlock corrects her. “And everything about Ryder, but very little, I’ve noticed, of what she said about you.”

“The usual. She was my therapist, Sherlock, what do you think?”

“I’m not talking about your leg or your trust issues.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t read—”

“I hardly need to. I’m uninterested in her diagnosis, Joanna. I’m interested in her goals. What did she mean to do with you?”

The van rattles. Jo’s bones rattle with it. “Use me against you, obviously. We’ve been over that.”

“As a distraction? As a hostage? She wouldn’t have needed to lure you so far in for that. As a source of information? You didn’t tell her anything.”

“Certain of that, are you?”

“You didn’t know anything worth telling.” She’s right, but it doesn’t help much to hear it put like that. “What was she planning?”

“You haven’t worked it out?”

“I have theories.”

“Overwhelm me.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything for a moment. When she does, it’s a struggle for Jo to hear it over the scraping of metal and groaning of the engine. “I’d rather hear it from you.”

Jo is grateful for the dark and for the noise. Sherlock cannot possibly see the water standing in her eyes, is unlikely even to hear the shake in her voice. “Leave it, will you?”

“Joanna,” she says, right in Jo’s ear. “You need to tell me.”

 _Probably_ , Jo thinks, but she says nothing.

 

***

 

 **Chapter Three:** A Practical Man of Affairs

 

Jo’s financial situation was rapidly becoming, well, a situation. Between the pension and her meagre savings she’d been able to hold up her half of the rent for several months after her ill-fated holiday, supplementing it with all the locum work she could find, but as the year wore on in boredom and loneliness and not enough, never nearly enough to _do_ , she began making noises about finding a new place. She shut up about it when Mrs Hudson told her she would do nothing of the sort.

“I’ve been thinking, love, and I think it’s time we took out an advert for the other bedroom.” Those quick, knowing eyes were just waiting for a reaction.

Everything in her recoiled. Everything, that was, except the soldier’s practicality she could still not escape.

“Right,” she said. “Makes sense.”

Mrs Hudson nodded briskly. “First thing’s to clean it out, then. Mrs Turner’s looking to get rid of some removal boxes; I’ll go fetch them.”

“Oh,” Jo said, startled. “Oh, but I—” _Haven’t set foot in there since it happened_ , was how that sentence ended, but that was an admission she wasn’t willing to make.

Mrs Hudson softened in sudden understanding. “Is it the leg, dear? Of course it is. You shouldn’t be lifting things. I’ll ask Mrs Turner’s lads if they’ve got an afternoon to spare.”

Her ache had been back, on and off. Jo had even reconciled herself to a new cane for the worst days, but it wasn’t as though she couldn’t manage a few boxes. “The leg’s just fine,” she said, nettled. “I can manage.”

“Of course you can. You get started and I’ll see about those boxes.”

 _Oh, well played_ , Jo thought with reluctant admiration, and then she turned unto the breach.

It could have been worse. She’d only been in Sherlock’s room a handful of times, not counting the nights she’d slept there when the stairs had been too much for her back, and the dust was thicker on the ground than the memories. Mrs Hudson’s brusque efficiency kept her moving, and it was difficult to indulge a melancholy fit while packing under the eye of a domestic drill sergeant. There was no reason at all to get choked up over a closetful of silk shirts and still less to cry over the desiccated fingers in the tin on the bedside table. Damned if she didn’t want to, for all that, but she would not meet her landlady’s determined momentum with a wilting upper lip.

“I’ll ring her brother,” said Mrs Hudson when they were through. “He said he could send someone by whenever we liked. Is there anything you’d like to keep, dear?”

Jo ran her fingers over the beloved new violin, wondering if Sherlock had regretted leaving it in London. This, surely, was more her memory than Mycroft’s; but it would be a crime to keep it as a silent shrine in the flat. It should be played. The other objects Jo most associated with her were nowhere to be seen, the coat and scarf discarded somewhere she couldn’t remember during their flight. “No,” she said. “Have them take it all.”

The trouble was the space it left in the flat, a hollowness like a sucking chest wound—which was a melodramatic comparison worthy of her teenage self, and her subconscious had no subtlety at all, had it? She straightened her spine and started drafting an advertisement. She realised all too quickly that “predilection for murder and high-speed foot-chases” would never do on the list of requirements. Jo closed her laptop with a dejected snap.

What she needed was a distraction, something to make her happy and fill the empty corners, and before long it came to her. She’d been sorting through regrets as she put her life back into place, and with Harry on the mend there was one might-have-been that stood head and shoulders above the rest.

In a burst of wild optimism, she decided to ring up the ex-boyfriend she’d fallen in love with and abandoned.

“Joanna,” said Scott Morstan. He sounded surprised, as well he might be. The last he’d heard from her had been just weeks after Switzerland, a blunt announcement of her continued existence at which he’d expressed gratitude mingled with concern and a side order of confusion. She hadn’t been in a very good frame of mind, as she told him now.

“I’m sorry,” she said, truly contrite. “It was rotten of me, all of it, and you deserved a better explanation. I just couldn’t put one together at the time.”

“Of course not.” Was he being understanding or dismissive? She couldn’t tell. This would be so much easier if she could see his face. “I take it things are better now?”

“Oh, much.” She hadn’t been shot at in _ages_. “You?”

“Good. Work’s brilliant, actually. We’ve got another show starting this weekend at the Emporium. I can get you tickets if you’d like.”

That was a segue if she’d ever heard one. Better to start small, though. “Actually, I wondered whether you were free for coffee sometime this week.” She bit the inside of her cheek and waited.

“I don’t think that’ll work,” he said. Her heart sank.

“Or next week, if you’re too busy. With the show, I mean.”

The pause this time was even longer. “When I say I don’t think it’ll work, I mean I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s been months, Joanna. I’m seeing someone.”

Of course he was. How could he not be, with a smile like that? “Oh,” she managed. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and she could almost believe that he was, but not nearly as sorry as Jo. What might they have had by now if she’d just kept herself out of the cross-hairs? “I’ve missed you. It was good, those weeks together. But I’ve thought about it, and I think we’re better off. It was too much, too soon, for both of us; my first relationship after Val, your first after Afghanistan. It couldn’t have worked.”

“You’re right, of course,” she said mechanically.

He went on, evidently encouraged. “You did me a world of good, though. I needed a push out the door. Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome. Glad to help.”

“Joanna—”

The doorbell buzzed, saving her from having to produce any further inanities. “Sorry, Scott. We’ve got movers downstairs. I should go.”

“All right. Take care of yourself.”

It was not his fault, she reminded herself. It was emphatically not his fault she’d left him and made a hash of coming back. “You, too.” She hung up. She didn’t follow it by hurling the phone across the room, but it was a near thing. She reflected with disgust that she was reverting to a sixteen-year-old and went to help Mrs Hudson with the movers.

Afterward, she retreated to her own room, where the neat sterility of dull furniture and hospital corners offered no target for her frustration, and shook open the morning paper with every intention of checking the rooms wanted. She paged through it absently, her mind less focused on the headlines than on _not_ thinking about Scott Morstan or Sherlock Holmes.

Until, that was, a name caught her eye in a two-paragraph piece on a recent arrest in an old kidnapping case, and suddenly her personal life was irrelevant.

***

She did not march into Scotland Yard straight away. Score one for rationality. Her throat did not clench up when she arrived late that afternoon, after phoning ahead and making an appointment like a good little citizen, and she counted that as another point in her favour. It was only when she accepted the laminated visitor’s badge that she remembered the way Sherlock had always contrived not to wear hers, in violation of Mycroft only knew how many regulations, and her hands shook as she slipped it over her head.

They were firm enough, though, when she sat down opposite Lestrade and demanded to know why she’d been kept in the dark.

“Paul Owens,” he said. “Software programmer. Moved to Bristol six years ago. Ever heard of him? No, I didn’t think so. Do you have any evidence connecting him to Madeleine Parsons or her uncle? Thought not.”

“But you should have told me,” she said. The lanyard for the visitor’s badge itched at the back of her neck. “Why didn’t you?”

Lestrade crossed his arms and leant back, frowning at her. She recognised that look. She’d given it to Harry often enough. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.” Jo had been _insufferable_ as a teenager.

“We haven’t seen you for a while.”

“You’d see me more if you contacted me whenever something broke in the Moriarty case.”

“When there’s something you can do, I’ll let you know.”

“Not good enough,” she snarled, which was just embarrassing.

Lestrade cocked his head to one side. “You need a drink.”

This was painfully true, and she wilted under his matter-of-fact stare. “Yeah. I probably do.”

He stood, so she had to crane her neck to look up at him. He was an oasis of solidity and reason in a rumpled suit, shoulders a little bent under the weight of bureaucracy, his face kind and his eyes kinder still because they offered her no judgement. “Come on,” he said. “I could use a few myself.”

He took her to a pub just a few blocks away. She’d never been, but it was familiar in the way of those places, the dimness and heavy wood of the tables and press of patrons at the bar all conspiring to soothe her right out of her sullenness. He captured seats in a back corner while she went for the drinks, and by the time she set a pint down in front of him she was almost relaxed.

She surprised herself by chatting easily, even casually, about work and Mrs Hudson and Harry, whose mobility was improving, and it was good of him to ask. He followed it up with a story about one of his old cases, something to do with a stolen BMW and a lapdog that started in Bloomsbury and covered half the districts of London, and by the time he’d finished they were both breathless with giggling.

They were well into their third round when she said, “I’m sorry about earlier. Bad morning, and then I saw about Owens. Didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

“Bad morning?”

“Personal things. Made an honest-to-God attempt at getting a private life back, and I let myself hope I had a chance at it. Should have known better, I suppose. Should have—” If she didn’t take care, she was going to dump it all right out on the table. Lestrade must have seen this; panic flickered behind his eyes. She took pity on him and shook her head. “Never mind. It’s for the best, really. I’m—I don’t think I’ve got the stomach for anything long-term just now.”

“The saving grace of one-nighters,” he said, as someone who knew.

“They’ve got their place, I suppose,” she said, reflectively. “But I’m not sure I have the stomach for people who don’t _understand_ , either. That make any sense?”

“I’m a bloody copper, what do you think? There’s nothing to kill the mood like getting pulled out of a woman’s bed because someone’s turned up strangled, but just try it when you’d only met her two hours before. What do you tell her, then? It’s enough to make you start sneaking around at work, just so you know she won’t need _that_ explained. But then there’s the chain of command to worry about.”

Jo was struck by this perspective, with all its echoes of her own experience. She could see the benefits of an office romance. “I suppose that explains Anderson and Donovan,” she said.

He snorted. “ _Nothing_ explains Anderson and Donovan.”

“She’s too good for him.”

“You think I don’t know that? You think _they_ don’t know that? That’ll fall apart eventually, and God help us all when it does. That’s the other trouble with the people who do understand.” He was studying his glass with great attention. “Not that I haven’t thought about it. You do, you know.”

“Do you?” She let a smile curve the corner of her mouth.

“You were a soldier, you know how it is. You work with someone. The job’s intense. There’s attraction. It’s one-sided, or it’s not. You ignore it, or you don’t, and if you don’t—it doesn’t always end well.”

“Not always badly, either,” Jo said. She had good memories of Afghanistan, too, buried in the rest so she had to sift through the rubble to get at them, but they were there to be found if she tried hard enough.

“True,” he agreed. “Not if you’re both starting from the same place and know when to stop, but that’s rare enough to make you give up trying.”

Now she had the feeling he was the one dumping everything on the table. “You’ve given up, then?”

He shrugged. “I suppose Herself made it simpler, really.”

The conversation had run away from her, and there was something she couldn’t quite read in that wry expression. “Sorry, what?”

“Sherlock,” he said, as though that explained everything. When it didn’t, he added, “That you’re not interested in men.”

 _Oh_. Slow tonight, wasn’t she? Jo set her glass down and looked, really looked at him, because this wasn’t something she wanted to misinterpret. “Wrong,” she said deliberately, and grinned when his eyes snapped up to hers.

He tasted of Scotch and rye bread and the negative space from all the smokes he hadn’t had that week. When she leant a little farther across the table so the edge dug into the soft flesh below her ribcage and his cheek rasped against her jaw, he made an approving sound in the back of his throat, and there really wasn’t any way to misinterpret that, was there?

Approving turned to alarmed, and perhaps there was. She freed her mouth. “What is it?”

“I’m twice your age.”

Startled, she pulled back to meet his eyes, which were frozen in an odd and ridiculous stare. She wondered how long he’d been using that as a convenient mental barrier, how long he’d been attracted—and God, this was really all kinds of flattering!—and then she gave in to the great belly laugh bubbling up inside her. “How old do you think I _am_?”

He had the grace to look abashed at that, which she loved, and before he could do anything ridiculous like apologise she dove right back across the table, and the next time either of them pulled back it was to suggest they move for the door.

***

“Thirty-nine,” she said, much later, into the crook of his neck.

“Mmm?”

She was sprawled over him, limbs heavy with the lassitude of exhaustion and spent endorphins. Jo was short but substantial, and before long she was probably going to have to move to spare him the weight, but for now she was far too comfortable. “I’m thirty-nine. Forty next week.” She felt much younger at the moment.

“Well, happy birthday in advance.” His voice came slow and gravelled, and he was just this edge of sleep.

She loved the contrast of different bodies pressed together, the colours in the light and the textures in the dark. His chin stung her ear with stubble when she turned her head. She stifled a yawn against the soft skin above his collarbone. “Me and Sherlock, really? You people do like your boxes.” He made a sound that was hard to interpret. “And what did you think I was doing with Scott Morstan?”

“Joanna,” he said. It was very nearly a grumble.

“Jo. It’s Jo.”

He was quiet after that. It went on for so long that she wondered if the correction had offended him, somehow, but then a light snore reassured her that he’d only fallen asleep. She smiled—her cheeks, she realised, were sore from laughing, and damned if this wasn’t the best idea she’d had in ages—and rolled off him to nod off herself.

She did not dream.

The next morning, she woke a little after dawn. She rose carefully and felt her way around the unfamiliar bedroom as quietly as she could. At length she found the shower, and she spent ten glorious minutes easing her muscles rubbery and loose under the hot spray. When she got out, she could hear creaks as he moved through his flat, and she considered whether to walk out as naked as she’d come in. It had been a cold night, though, and she didn’t want to present a display of gooseflesh before breakfast, so in the end she helped herself to the unexpectedly fluffy robe hanging on the door and padded out into the hall. It was laughably long on her, but she found it too comfortable to mind.

He was puttering around in the kitchen when she joined him. He looked up from a pair of mugs and smiled, the corners of his eyes going all crinkly. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

They drank it in comfortable silence as the morning stretched around them. “I have to be in soon,” he said.

“You’ll be wanting this back, then?” She gestured to the robe.

He eyed her with evident appreciation. “It suits you.”

“I thought so.”

He brought up the hand that wasn’t holding his coffee to rub at the back of his neck. “Look, Joanna—Jo—” She was glad he’d heard that. “This was good. Better than good.”

“But?”

“But I meant what I said last night.”

“Which bit of it?” The better parts hadn’t involved much talking. Giggling, yes. He had a wonderful giggle.

“The part about knowing when to stop.”

She set her coffee down, frowning at him. “So did I. You don’t think I’m planning to get all fluttery over this, do you? I said I didn’t have the stomach for a relationship.”

“You did. I’m just—” He gestured at nothing in particular, and the coffee sloshed in his mug. “I’m setting down terms.”

“Terms for dealing with last night?” She didn’t want fallout. He wasn’t going to make this complicated, was he? Damn the man—but he was shaking his head.

“Terms for next time. And any time. If you don’t mind.”

Now that was much better. “Greg Lestrade, am I your alternative to a clandestine office romance?”

“A much better alternative,” he assured her. “No strings. No chain of command. Just drinks, whenever we both need them. And after, whenever we need that. If you want.”

“All right, then. I want.” They clinked their mugs together solemnly. No strings. Jo could get used to that. She offered him a slow grin. “I’d say I want right now, but you need the shower.”

“I do.” He sounded reluctant. She approved.

“It’s Saturday,” she pointed out. “You could stay and have an actual weekend. Or—but I suppose you need to deal with Owens.”

She shouldn’t have brought it up. “But you don’t. Promise me you’ll leave it, Jo. He had nothing to do with Harry. Or Sherlock.”

“He might know where Moran is.”

All the ease had drained from his face, leaving a tension and weariness the night had driven out. She hated to see it back. “It’s still about that? We’re working on it. We’re doing everything. We’ve been in contact with his colleagues in the army, his sister, everyone he might have turned to. We’ve even been working with Interpol, which is the last thing any domestic force wants. If he can be found, we’ll do it.”

Jo hadn’t known Moran had a sister. She didn’t comment on that, though her mind started humming away; it wouldn’t do to show him he’d caught her attention. “You think he’s still abroad, then,” she said instead, cradling her mug in both hands and trying to look disappointed.

“It seems likely,” he said, “which means there’s even less you could do.”

“Mmm,” she said, and let him take it as agreement.

Her mood that week was so improved that she took to Mrs Hudson’s plans with energy. A new flatmate was an admirable and practical solution, she decided, and it would do her good to have another person around. Their advertisement received a number of inquiries, no surprise given the location and more-than-reasonable rates, and the applicants were duly interviewed. They settled on a woman named Savitri Naidu who had a job in international banking and unimpeachable credit. She expressed no interest in cadavers and did not play the violin.

“Reliable, that’s what we need,” Mrs Hudson declared, and if her heart didn’t seem to be in it, well, Jo wasn’t about to disagree.

She was too busy to mind, anyhow. She’d soon decided the trouble with criminal investigations was knowing where to begin. It wasn’t that she had any hope of actually finding Moran, but she could certainly find more _about_ him, and Lestrade had offered her the first clue. Methods and alibis had been Sherlock’s trade, the objects and actions that made up a case, but Jo rather thought she had a monopoly on people. That was where she’d start.

***

The door was opened by a plump woman not much taller than Jo. Her face was lined with what looked to be stress as much as age, but her short dark hair was peppered with grey. Clear blue eyes were dampened by drooping, cynical lids, and the look she gave Jo spoke more of wariness than welcome. “Doctor Watson?”

“Jo, please. It is Sabine Moran, isn’t it?”

“You said you had some questions about my brother.” Moran’s eyes travelled over her, assessing. The advantage of being short and female was that no-one ever regarded you as a threat. “Please, come in.”

Tea was far better than alcohol as a social lubricant, Jo thought, waiting as Moran put the kettle on and arranged the kitchen table for company. It gave you something to do, and there were few things more valuable than occupation.

“You’re not the first,” Moran said. Her voice was low, pleasant and tired at the same time. “I’ve had police through here more times than I can count. They’re tapping my phone, you know, just in case he tries to reach me. He won’t, but they insisted.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You’re not with the police, then?”

“Not exactly.”

“With the press?” Moran’s eyes narrowed.

“No, not at all,” said Jo, who had not considered this interpretation and found herself subtly offended.

“Good. I didn’t think any of this was public.”

“It’s not. Nothing to do with your brother, anyhow. I’m involved in the investigation, but I’m not with the police.”

“How’s that?”

Might as well come out with it. Part of it. “My sister was shot last spring,” Jo said. “She survived, but only just.”

Sabine Moran blinked. “And you think—”

“I know it was your brother. My—a friend of mine was looking into it. She got close. Too close, actually. She was killed a few weeks later.”

Moran’s face was closed, its only evidence of reaction the absence of same, but her shoulders sagged just visibly. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“I’m not here about blame,” Jo said. “Like I said, I’ve got a sister. I know how much say we have in other people’s mistakes.” She’d been going for levity, but it fell flat. Drinking and imploding marriages, cold-blooded murder—not really on the same level, but none of it was at all funny.

Moran didn’t even acknowledge the attempt. “So what’s it you want from me? I’ve told them already. I haven’t seen my brother in years, and I don’t want to. If he’s in trouble, he won’t come here.”

“I don’t want information from you.” They’d have squeezed that out of her already, no doubt missing all the important bits without Sherlock there to do it for them, but Jo could hardly do better. “I’m asking for insight. I want to know what he was like.”

Moran’s lips tensed. “You’ve just said it. We might be sisters, but that doesn’t give us any control over their mistakes. Seb and I weren’t close, even growing up.”

“Control and understanding are different,” Jo said. “My sister’s not at all like me in a lot of ways, but we came from the same place. That matters.”

She frowned, not resisting this but thinking. “Like I said, I’ve told them everything I could.”

It was going to be like pulling teeth, Jo saw. Not an area of medicine in which she had much experience. Extracting bullets, now that was a better comparison. Delicate, so as not to damage the surrounding tissue, but occasionally it required a certain amount of brute force.

Of course, sometimes it was safer just to leave the hot little lumps of metal where they’d settled, but that wasn’t an option in this case.

All right, then, she’d start with a question she’d been posed a time or two hundred herself. “Why did he join the army?”

“It runs in the family. Dad always expected it. I’ve never seen him as happy as when Sebastian made Major.” Jo stifled a pang of recognition. “He taught him to shoot, brought him to his gun club. Seb was a crack shot, talked about it all the time. He jumped at the chance to earn his living doing something he was good at.” Her face twisted. “He loved his job.”

 _He liked the war a little too much,_ Sherlock had said. _Rather like you, in fact, but with drastically different consequences._

“He was discharged after Kuwait in ‘91,” Jo said. “I understand it was a medical.”

“Yes, but you know what I think?” Jo shook her head. Sabine leant forward. Good, confiding was good, and clearly this particular revelation had been seething for years. “I think they were _relieved_.”

That rang true. Nobody took pleasure in a dishonourable discharge, and if Moran had been as a good a shot as Jo had excellent reason to believe, they wouldn’t have wanted to leave any margin for debate. Jo chose her next words with care. “You think he’d started to abuse his position. You think the army turned him wrong, somehow.”

“You don’t understand. Sebastian was never…right.” That, too, made sense. It wasn’t that combat didn’t change people. Of course it did, and sometimes in unexpected ways. Still, she’d found if you looked hard enough at the _before_ , you’d find something that explained the _after_. _Man is the sum of his experiences_ , she thought, and the experiences of adulthood didn’t erase everything that came earlier. “He liked control. I’d say he was a bully, but you know, I’ve met that sort, and I’ve thought they got in the habit of hurting other people so they didn’t feel so small themselves. That’s not why Seb liked it.”

She was using the past tense still, Jo noticed, and wondered if that was just because she was drawing on memory or just that it made this easier. “Why did he like it?”

“Because he already knew he was bigger. He didn’t have to prove it. He just used it.”

And a younger sister would know. Jo busied herself with the tea, now quite cool. By the time she’d drained it, Moran was composed again.

“How did he take the discharge?” Jo asked.

Moran laughed humourlessly. “About as you’d expect. Without the army, he was—I have this memory of going to the zoo when we were little. All of us went, took the train to Chester, made a day of it. Seb wanted to see the big cats. I hated the roaring and the smell, but we went, and I remember they had a male tiger there, and he wasn’t making any noise, wasn’t doing anything interesting enough for Seb to care, but I stood there and watched him just pace. You could _see_ the resentment. I remember thinking if he ever got half a chance, he wouldn’t eat me because he was hungry. He’d eat me just because he could. Just because he’d been waiting so long for someone to let him out.” Her voice was distant, reflective. “So I stopped seeing my brother. It wasn’t doing either of us any good.“

Jo cleared her throat. “Was that the last saw of him?”

“Oh, he turned up every couple of years, to see how I was getting on. Thought it was his responsibility, I suppose. Family is family, and he always had some very specific ideas about what men owed their women. He got that from Dad, too.” She shrugged. “But I don’t know what he was doing with himself. Well, I suppose we do now, don’t we? But if you want insight there, I’m the wrong one to ask. You might try his therapist. I don’t know how long he saw her, but I met her once or twice at the beginning. Clever woman. She’d be able to tell you more, if she’s allowed.”

Yes, of course. “Was that Sonia Ginzberg?”

“I think so. You have asked her, then?”

“She also died a year and a half ago.”

“Ah,” Moran said. Still no shock. Jo wondered if she had any left. “Sebastian, again?”

“No,” Jo said. “No, that wasn’t him.” She had her own trail of bodies to claim.

And then Jo realised why her earlier attempt at comparison had failed so miserably. She’d paired them up the wrong way ‘round. Drinking and failed relationships were one thing, a more-or-less private destruction that wouldn’t leave a wake large enough to rock more than a few other people unlucky enough to be caught up in it. The killing, on the other hand, the gift for physical violence and the irresistible attraction to death, the incidental harm they’d brought down on their own sisters—Sabine was not the Moran sibling Jo most resembled.

The thought made her nauseous, and she finished the interview with something less than perfect attention, leaving Moran with her number and a rather weak request to contact Jo if anything turned up.

***

She returned to Baker Street in time to help Naidu with the move. Her collection of boxes seemed sterile, almost, with little to mark the personality behind them. Jo was reminded somewhat of her own belongings before she’d settled in. There was a healthy collection of books, but they were mostly dry tomes on finance and a number in other languages whose subjects Jo could only guess at. Not a mystery or a romance novel among them. Naidu—Savitri, very quickly—decorated her room with a few family photos and made some unobjectionable additions to the furniture in the flat’s common areas, but in all she seemed bland and almost preternaturally unobtrusive. Perhaps this was just by virtue of comparison, Jo thought, and told herself she wasn’t disappointed.

Savitri took care of half the rent, but Jo’s savings were quite used up by now, and she wanted a firmer buffer against Harry’s guest room than Mrs Hudson’s generosity and the support of a flatmate she barely knew. She screwed up her courage and dialled a number she’d been holding in reserve. She’d last used it to offer an apology that hadn’t been nearly abject enough, judging by its lukewarm reception.

Lukewarm was still the word for it. Sarah’s voice down the line sounded remote, even unfriendly. Jo supposed she couldn’t blame her. “But have you heard of anything? I hate to ask, but I’m—” Desperate? “I’d really like a referral. Even if you know someone who’s just hiring weekends. Anything, so long as it’ll last.”

“I probably shouldn’t be doing this,” Sarah said. “Not after last time.”

“I was good at it,” Jo said. Whatever her other failings, she was a damn good doctor. “And I gave you notice.”

“Yes, you did. It was very professional of you.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“Well, I _had_ thought we were friends.”

Jo winced. “I made a hash of things. Not just with you, if that helps.”

“Why would it?” There was a considering silence. “All right, here it is. I’ve been talking with Adrian Lewis,” she said, naming the clinic’s senior GP. “He wants to take us private.”

“Oh,” Jo said, frowning, trying to recall what little she’d gleaned about the inner workings of the clinic’s management structure. “That’s…sudden.”

“Not really. You mostly stayed out of the politics.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in private practice.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“So you’re leaving?”

“I’m doing more than that. I’m setting up my own surgery.”

Jo’s eyebrows shot up. “In this economy?”

“That’s what everyone’s said.” Sarah sounded resigned. Determined, too, though. That was promising. “I can show you the business plan if you like, and I can go on for hours about Quality and Outcomes.”

“I’m sure you’ve thought it through.”

“But I need more staff.”

Jo’s gut gave a hopeful flutter. “I can send my CV right over.”

“Does it look much different to the first one I saw?”

“I’ve got additional experience in being blown up and fleeing the country, if that helps.” _Tread lightly, now,_ Jo thought.

“I’m especially interested in hearing your reasons for leaving your last position.”

Jo winced. “I think those had better stay personal.”

“Just so long as this stays professional,” Sarah replied.

Professionally, she was pleased. Personally—but if she started counting regrets now, she’d never stop. “All right. Do you want an interview?”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Sarah said. “I’ve got a meeting with a real estate agent Monday at nine, and I could use someone to stand behind my shoulder and frown supportively.”

“I make an excellent wingman, provided you don’t expect any actual financial advice.”

“Right.” Jo held her breath for the next long pause. “Monday, then? I’ll text you with the address.”

“Thank you.” That was just a little fervent for pure professionalism, but Jo meant it, and a weight slid right off her shoulders. She might—just might—be able to salvage one more thing from the wreckage of Moriarty.

***

And salvage she did, but it wasn’t easy. She skated on thin ice with Sarah for months as the plans for the surgery began to take concrete form, until at length they forged something delicate but promising, not so easy as their initial friendship but still well worth saving. Even if it _was_ buried in a sea of NHS forms.

She got home late one afternoon after a deadly dull meeting about the intricacies of finance and hiring practices. She was nothing but dead weight when it came to business; maybe she ought to retire gracefully from the field and devote more of her time to training new staff. She thought she’d be good at that. Competence was its own reward, but passing it along was even better.

Savitri was out and Mrs Hudson’s windows were dark, and Jo had often found loneliness bred laziness. She reheated some week-old curry from the back of the refrigerator, lacking even the energy to worry about food poisoning, and collapsed on the sofa in track bottoms and an overlarge jumper. She was still sitting there hours later, staring at the telly without really knowing what was on it, when the door to the street opened. It stayed that way for a long moment—too long—before closing, and when at last a tread fell on the stairs, it was hesitant and uneven.

She looked up curiously as her flatmate reached the landing. “All right?”

“Fine.” But as Savitri stepped forward, she wove dangerously, and Jo was on her feet before she knew it.

“What happened?” Jo demanded, concern warring with cold anger as she seized her elbow, because there was blood trickling from under Savitri’s short hair. Her colour looked terrible.

“Nothing. Fine. Just need to check in.”

“You need an ambulance. Sit down and tell me what happened. We’ll get it sorted.” Jo spotted a long, narrow tear in the fabric of her jacket. Was that a bullet-graze on her shoulder? She leant in closer.

“No!” Savitri pulled away with a strength and violence that startled Jo. “No ambulance. Just need to check in.”

She’d seen incoherence and emphatic stubbornness before in A&E, and it usually meant either high degrees of intoxication or concussion. No question which of the two she was seeing now. “Sit _down_ ,” Jo said, reaching for Savitri’s arm, this time with a much firmer grasp. Half a second later she was on her back, blinking in pain and surprise, having been flipped right over in a throw as remarkable for its neat professionalism as much as for its effectiveness. Not to mention its source. Where had _Savitri_ learnt—this was not good.

Jo levered herself upright, wincing. She’d be lucky to come out of this without a concussion of her very own. Her flatmate, she of the boring but demanding career in investment analysis, she of the regular schedule and barely-existent social life, she of the heretofore unimagined skills in hand-to-hand combat, was backed against the wall, not even breathing hard but scanning the corners of the room with dangerous eyes. She seemed to have forgotten Jo, who wasn’t at all certain whether this was a good thing.

There could be any number of innocent explanations, but grim suspicion had already taken hold. What to do now? There were several ways she could handle this and at least several ways it might turn out, but they all depended on factors Jo had no way of confirming. She swallowed and took a gamble. “Savitri?”

Her head jerked toward Jo. “I don’t want an ambulance.”

“All right,” Jo agreed. “Can I have a look at your head?”

Savitri stared at her. Jo couldn’t get a good read on her pupils from that distance. “I have to check in,” she said at last, firm and coherent even if Jo couldn’t make sense of her meaning. Jo shrank back as she stalked past and disappeared into the hall.

“Well, damn,” Jo said to the empty sitting room, and then she rang for emergency services.

It was the only possible thing, she told herself. She had no gun, no way of protecting herself if—what? If Savitri was dangerous? Jo could only hope the head injury kept her addled and out of the way until help arrived.

The dispatcher’s voice was cool and familiar in its quick competence, and she didn’t question what was admittedly a very odd situation. The sound of wheels pulling up to the kerb outside came scant minutes later, and Jo was doubly impressed by their efficiency.

Impressed was not quite the word for it when she opened the door to three tall, well-built men with handguns. “You can’t bring those in here,” she said, stupid with shock, but they proceeded to do just that, pushing past her and up the stairs without a word.

She whipped back around to what was unquestionably neither an ambulance nor a police vehicle. Instead, it was a sleek black car that still purred in readiness, and as for the woman standing on the kerb—no wonder the dispatcher had sounded familiar.

“ _You_ ,” Jo said, the name failing her. The vague pronoun took some bite out of the accusation. She cleared her throat and tried again. “You hacked my phone!”

“We rerouted your 999 calls the moment you got your new number,” the woman said, barely glancing up from her BlackBerry. Anthea, that was it. Or not it, as Jo recalled. “Contingencies.”

“Of all the interfering….” She didn’t really know how to end that.

“It’s just as well we did,” Anthea said, fingers still darting about. “The police would have found Ms Naidu a handful.”

“You’ve been looking into her, then,” Jo said, struggling to keep up. “She’s with Moriarty?”

Anthea’s eyebrows flew up, and she gave Jo her full attention for just long enough to convey polite disdain. “Oh, no.”

Before Jo could pursue that avenue of inquiry, the door came open again to release a party of four. Savitri was walking under her own power, if unsteadily, and when one of the men held the rear door of the car for her she got in without complaint. Not with Moriarty, then.

Anthea had turned her back. “Wait,” Jo said. “Wait, don’t you dare—”

The doors slammed, and the car slid quietly into the street. She stared after it for a full minute before going back inside.

It was late morning by the time Savitri returned. She wore a fresh suit, neatly pressed, and a professional-looking bandage over one temple. She looked exhausted and ill but quite in possession of herself.

“Morning,” Jo said, a little stiffly. “How’s the concussion?”

“Unpleasant. I’ve had one before. It beats a bullet through the ribs, though, and I’ve had one of those too.” It was a morbid and matter-of-fact way to acknowledge her status as, what? Government agent? Armed nanny? “They had drugs, too, and I’m afraid that’s what did me in. I understand I was violent. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Mind telling me what the hell’s going on?” Jo asked, keeping her voice level.

“I’m sure you grasp the general idea,” Savitri replied, coming to sit beside her on the couch. “I’ve been assigned as your protection detail. It’s not all I do—last night was unrelated, for example—but even Holmes’ employees need somewhere to live. You make a better flatshare than most. He trusts you.”

“Really.”

Savitri grinned in a flash of rare mischief. “He doesn’t mistrust you. You could think of it as doing the government a favour.”

“Or I could think of it as an invasion of my privacy.”

Savitri shrugged, then winced. Her head must be splitting. “It’s open to interpretation. I don’t tell him everything. The state of your relationship with Harry, for example, isn’t of much concern.”

“And the state of my other relationships?”

“DI Lestrade is a reliable sort of man. Unobjectionable, from a security standpoint. I keep an eye out for others, yes, but it’s not your sexual activities that interest me.”

“Which activities do interest you?”

“Your obsession with Colonel Moran, primarily,” she said. “The visit you paid his sister was just before my time, but that hasn’t been all, has it? Your browser history is very telling, and those army records must have made for some awfully dull reading. If you’d ever gone haring off after him, I’d have gone directly to Holmes. After I’d cuffed you to the handrail downstairs, of course.”

“I won’t,” Jo said. “If Holmes and the Yard haven’t had any luck, I know I can’t find him myself.”

“Then what _are_ you hoping to find?” She sounded genuinely curious.

Jo shook her head. “Would you believe I don’t know?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“It’s true, though, or nearly true. I want understanding, I suppose. I want him exposed.”

“Leave it,” Savitri advised. “Follow Owens’ trial from a distance; that couldn’t do you any harm. But leave Moran and the others. You’ve in no position to achieve anything, and you’ll find you’re on a very short leash.”

“Yes, I see that now,” Jo said acerbically.

Savitri waved it off. “So leave him to the professionals.”

“Like you?”

“I’m not on the Moriarty case.”

“But you’re on mine.”

“I was,” Savitri said. “It seems I’ve blown my cover, and marks tend to get hostile when they know they’re being watched.”

Jo brought her hands up to massage her temples. She hadn’t managed any sleep, and this was all a bit much. “Suppose I tell you to move out and find myself a new flatmate. What are the odds she won’t be in Mycroft Holmes’ employ?”

“If it’s not the flatmate, it’ll be a neighbour, or the new receptionist at your clinic, or maybe he’ll try to buy out Mrs Hudson.”

Jo sighed. She was probably going to regret this. “Might as well keep to a known quantity. We can make this work. Just stop prying through my computer, will you?”

“Of course,” Savitri said readily.

She was a very smooth liar, Jo thought with wry admiration, and she had to admit the discovery of Mycroft Holmes’ fingerprints all over her life was true to form. Still, there was one thing she didn’t understand at all. “I don’t suppose he bothered to tell you why? I thought he’d forgotten all about me. I don’t know anything dangerous. I’m not valuable to Mycroft, or to Moriarty, for that matter.”

“My employer is a great champion of curiosity,” Savitri said, “just so long as it isn’t aimed in his direction.”

“And if he had mentioned it, you wouldn’t tell me. Right.” She shook her head and stood. “You’ll be wanting a cold compress and neurological checks at regular intervals. I’m going to catch a nap, but I’ll look in on you soon. Wake me if you start having co-ordination problems.”

Savitri threw her an ironic salute. “Your country thanks you for your service.”


	4. A Step Upon the Stair

They’ve got a double room in a quaint, comfortable hotel nestled in the Swiss Alps. The window is wide open to a cool evening breeze, and the beds are beautifully soft. Jo’s gun rests on the night-stand.

Sherlock has just come from the shower. Her hair is dark and wet against the fluffy white towels, and Jo relaxes into this comfortable domesticity, sleepy and content.

“What tomorrow?” Jo asks.

Sherlock gives her a bland look. “I thought we’d go hiking.”

Jo glances down at the tall backpacks that lie near the door. They look convincingly worn, as though Sherlock hadn’t purchased them a few days ago along with the hardy boots and jackets that make up the rest of their fugitives’ costume, as though the two women are indeed a pair of ramblers on holiday. “All right.”

Sherlock’s mouth twitches. She probably expected some token protest. “How’s the leg?”

“Just fine, thanks.” She’s been following Jo’s movements with irritating care, and Jo knows what she’s really asking. _And how quickly can you run for your life if they’ve followed us from Bern?_ Jo leans back into the mattress, gazing up at the chequered curtains blowing across her bed. “Ginzberg wanted me to kill you.”

She can’t see Sherlock’s face. Jo thinks that might have been an unconscious choice on her own part.

“How did she plan to achieve that?” Jo’s never been so grateful for Sherlock’s cool, analytical approach.

“She never said, exactly,” Jo informs the cream-coloured ceiling. “Prime me to a hair-trigger, I suppose. She managed that much with Moran’s help. She said I’d be a moral liability. I suppose she’d just have pointed me in the right direction: civilians, the Yard, you.”

“That’s the most idiotic plan I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it? I nearly killed my ex-boyfriend, remember.”

“You thought he was with Moriarty.”

“I was wrong.”

“It wouldn’t have been a loss to the world. Sutton is an arse.”

“But nobody died because of him. You—” Sherlock has moved to stand over her bed, and Jo meets her eyes at last. “Harry’d never have been shot if you’d backed off from Moriarty. Paul Griffiths, Roberta Anderson, Charles Harris: they’d all still be alive.”

“And you blame me for that?”

“No,” Jo says honestly. “I don’t.”

“And if you did blame me, would you have killed me for it? To stop another death? To stop Harry’s?”

“I’ve killed before.” And Sherlock hasn’t. Jo is almost certain of that. One of the precious few things she knows that Sherlock doesn’t: what it’s like to look at a man and end him. Jo shivers. Sherlock is looking down at her, hair still dripping, eyes clear and curious. Jo imagines looking at this woman and ending her. “No. I wouldn’t. Not—not like that. If you were the one pulling the trigger, yes. I think.” There was a time not so long ago when Jo knew how to be decisive. She’s lost some of that surety. _Suppose you tell me, Dr Watson, what it takes to make you kill a man._

She’s afraid she’s handled this wrong, that this will shatter the firm and unquestioned peace they’ve forged since Jo tried to leave her and was driven right back, but Sherlock is looking at her as though she’s a complete idiot. That shouldn’t make her feel better, but of course it does.

“Did it never occur to you that Sonia Ginzberg was a liar?”

Jo stares up at her. “I—”

“The woman manipulated you into becoming her patient, spent months analysing you, and then went to great effort to dismantle you, Joanna. You don’t honestly think she was above preying on your overdeveloped sense of culpability.”

“It wasn’t all lies. She helped me, Sherlock.”

“She did her best to drive you over the edge. Why would she start telling the truth just because you’d found her out? I realise the logical approach goes against your nature, but you might at least make an attempt.” Sherlock’s expression has turned introspective. “No, it won’t hold up. As a thought experiment, however, it is intriguing. My death, to take me out of the game—but you wouldn’t have done it yourself.”

“No.” She needs to allow herself that much certainty. Ginzberg may have shaken her to the bones, but Jo won’t let herself crack. “Not like that, Sherlock.”

Sherlock smiles. It’s not the brilliant, brittle one of joy in the chase or the bright, winning one she uses on unsuspecting witnesses. This one goes straight to her eyes, and Jo thinks, _That is all mine_. “We’ll have to make certain the choice is never relevant, won’t we?”

“False dichotomy, anyway.” Jo swings her bare feet up into the bed and speaks through a yawn, exhaustion catching up to her. “S’not a choice between your death and anyone else’s.”

Sherlock says something in reply, but Jo won’t remember it in the morning. The room is quiet, and soon she drifts off to sleep.

 

***

 

 **Chapter 4:** A Step Upon the Stair

 

It was a Friday night in early January. Joanna had just finished a long shift at the clinic, and she came home to find Savitri intent on her computer. She got no more than an abstracted wave as she shrugged off her coat, which meant work. Something sensitive, no doubt. Jo hoped she wouldn’t learn the details in tomorrow’s headlines.

It had been a long week, the sort that left you drained without any associated sense of accomplishment. Jo hated that. Her neck and shoulders were tense from too many hours at a desk, she’d resorted to the cane more days than not, and her hand tremor was back for no good reason at all.

Which left only one question: tea, wine, or something that would smart as it went down? She was saved the decision when her mobile started buzzing. She glanced at the screen and was smiling even as she hit _Accept_. “Detective Inspector, I believe this is what’s known among the younger generation as a ‘booty call’.”

Savitri glanced up from her laptop, amused. Lestrade’s voice was dry to the point of flatness, but Jo put that down to poor reception. “Sorry to disappoint. I just wanted—”

“We haven’t spoken in a month and a half and now you ring at this hour on a weekend? You can’t tell me you have noble intentions. Give me twenty minutes.”

“Joanna.” This stopped her in her tracks. He hadn’t called her that in almost two years. “Tuesday afternoon, we had an anonymous tip.”

“And?” Her throat was dry.

“And it paid off. We’ve got Sebastian Moran in custody now.”

She swallowed. “What are you charging him with?”

“Three counts of homicide, so far. Paul Griffiths and Roberta Anderson—I’m sure you remember them—and another case, a shooting in Bath a few years back. There’s a money trail on that one. We can link it straight to Moriarty.”

“And to Moran?”

“Well, there’s the rub. Everything we have on him is circumstantial. But I’m what you’d call cautiously optimistic.”

She didn’t—couldn’t—say anything, just stood there in the middle of the sitting room until Savitri started looking concerned. “Good,” Jo said inanely. “That’s good. Do you need—”

“You never had a thing to do with him,” he said at once. “We won’t need you. Unless you’ve remembered something else…?”

“Sherlock gave me his name,” she said. “She told me it was him.”

“Which won’t do us any good in court without her evidence to back it up. Don’t worry, though. We’ve got months to sort things out before this comes to trial.”

“Right,” Jo said. “Right. That’s fine, then.” She rubbed her hand up and down her thigh, massaging the sore muscle underneath, and she tried to think. “Has anyone told his sister?”

“What do you know about her?”

“That she exists, which you told me. And—I met her once.”

“Jo.” She tried to read either exasperation or concern in that, but she came up dry. He just sounded tired. “This isn’t your job. You’re not Sherlock.”

All this time, and that name still twisted something in her gut. “You don’t need to tell me that.”

“So leave it to us. Last thing I need—the very last thing—is you running about in back alleys while I’ve got an investigation on.”

That hardly described her visit to Sabine Moran, but she conceded the point. “All right. I promise. Just don’t bollocks this up.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You managed Owens and Kempe without me, and I was glad to see them put away—but Moran shot Harry.” The numb shock had passed, and now the words came tumbling out. “He killed two people in my place and then he _shot my sister_.”

“I remember.”

“I want to see him, Lestrade.” She was fairly certain she hadn’t meant to say that. “I want to _see him_.”

“Are you out of your mind?” he demanded. “I said leave it to us! The best thing you can do is sit back and wait.”

“Like hell.”

“Joanna, fair warning’s all I can give you. I’ll phone you when there’s more news.” And he hung up.

She laid the phone down and looked up at Savitri, who had got to her feet by then and was watching Jo with a mixture of alarm and cool, professional assessment. It was a rare reminder of what this woman did for a living.

She smiled. Judging by Savitri’s stance, it was not reassuring.

“I want you to talk to your boss,” Jo said. “I need a favour.”

***

It wasn’t as though she liked the idea of running up a debt with Mycroft Holmes, but she had to admit the man got results. Early Monday morning she was ushered into a holding cell. There were no witnesses, and she’d been promised privacy from the Met’s surveillance. It was understood that both the cell’s occupants would emerge in the same physical condition as they’d entered it, but beyond that she’d been given no restrictions.

She almost regretted that. The urgent fury that had overtaken her at Lestrade’s news had been far too like the unthinking certainty that had once led her to draw a gun on an unarmed man. Phil Sutton hadn’t had a thing to do with Moriarty, and Sherlock had been there to tell her so, but in this case Jo thought it was just as well she no longer had the gun.

He sat with his arms folded, hands tucked away under his elbows in a pose that would have seemed defensive if he hadn’t had the trick of owning whatever space he was in. Despite a gaunt face scored with lines of pain and hard use, he was clean-shaven and neat, his grey and thinning hair cropped close. There was something of his sister in the jaw and aggressive nose. His blue eyes were certainly a family trait. They tracked her with calm curiosity, lingering on the cane and the tremor. He had a hunter’s eyes, Jo thought. She’d seen that look before. In the mirror, most frequently.

She suppressed a shudder and limped stiffly to sit down opposite him. The interrogation table between them was just a formality, a prop demanded by procedure. There were no real buffers here. This was the end of it all.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, distantly glad that she could keep an even tone.

“Dr Watson, I presume. You’re the reason I’m here.”

“Am I?” Was he going to confess?

“I hear you’ve been telling the police all about me,” he said. “You’ve got quite a lot to say about a man you’ve never met.”

“I met your sister,” Jo said. “She’s told me all about you.”

“I doubt it. Never did meet yours, did I?”

“Depends on your definition, I suppose.”

He smiled. “I imagine it does. Come to gloat, have you? They won’t convict me.”

“We’ve got you, Moran.”

“You have my military record and the word of Sherlock Holmes,” he said, “and I don’t see her taking the witness stand.” His mouth curled, and he looked at Jo as though they were sharing an excellent joke.

She’d spent years swallowing rage and grief in the best military tradition, but now they both came boiling up. “Don’t say her name,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare.”

“Oh, I dare. She can’t touch me.”

“She did all she needed to. It’s been a long time since you’ve had Moriarty at your back. Your ground support’s been routed, Colonel. It’s time to surrender. How many other bodies do you think they’ll turn up, now they’re really looking?”

“Sonia Ginzberg’s,” he said. “How about hers?”

With time, that accusation had lost its edge. She ignored it. “Three murders so far. I’ll see they charge you for Sherlock’s, too.”

He laughed. Had she said something funny? “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, Watson, if you think they’ll make that case. I know for a _fact_ they never pulled a bullet out of her. That’s one body they’ll never turn up.” She frowned in confusion, and those eyes grew keener. “Or don’t you know?”

“Know what?” Jo said sharply. “Know what Jim Ryder did to her? Of course I do. But Mycroft’s people spotted you in Bern, you know. You were there. Even if they can’t prove you made it to the Falls—”

“Good God,” he said. “You really don’t know, do you? What do think I’ve been doing since then?”

“Running. And shooting more people, I expect.”

He was still smiling. “Watson, this is the best thing I’ve heard in years. Are you ever in for it. You’re dead wrong. About everything, not least my chances of walking away from this scot-free.”

“I doubt it,” she said. He was trying to twist her, to catch her off guard, but she wouldn’t let him. Oh, to have met him with a gun in her hand. Pity the days of duelling were over; she’d love to find out which of them was the better shot at fifty paces. “We have you.”

“You really don’t. I haven’t shot a man since I was discharged.” She laughed. He sneered right back. “Don’t believe me, Doctor?” He lifted both his hands and laid them flat on the table.

She’d read enough of his service record to know it had been heavily abridged before it arrived in her hands, but the medical details had been even barer of real data than the rest. There’d been no x-rays, no photographs, no surgeon’s reports, and she hadn’t known the nature of his wound. Now it was all too apparent. The index and middle finger of his right hand had been shorn right off, and all that remained of the other fingers was a stub ending at the first knuckle. The left was in somewhat better condition, but even there she saw a knot of scar tissue, and the fingers were bent at anatomically unlikely angles.

“What’s your diagnosis?” The dismay must have been plain on her face, because he was watching her with all the satisfaction of a man who’d hit his mark. “Munitions explosion. You know, all they fed the Op Granby troops was chicken in brown sauce. Haven’t eaten it since. Just after it happened, I remember looking down at these and thinking, _Chicken in brown sauce, that’s just it_ …you remember the smell, Watson.”

She sucked in air. “You could still fire.”

He raised his right hand and waggled the stubs at her. “My dominant, this one. And the left’s a bloody mess, too.”

“That doesn’t mean you couldn’t. It’s not proof.”

“These bumbling Yarders have just received copies of my medical records at discharge, complete with x-rays that make my left phalanges look like matchsticks and a surgeon’s prognosis saying I’ll never fire a weapon again. Griffiths was shot through his office window from across a street. With a handgun.” He looked down at his hands, flexing them carefully. Then he looked back up at her. “Could you have done it with these, Major?”

He knew about Jefferson Hope, oh yes. He had killed Paul Griffiths and Roberta Anderson, and he’d tried to kill Harry and had a hand in Sherlock’s death. She wouldn’t let him get out of it. “I’ve seen more miraculous recoveries in my time. With your eye, with practise and therapy and effort, your left hand could still make that shot.”

Moran leant in. His breath smelled of toothpaste, fresh and clean, and his eyes were twin bayonets. “As one gimp to another, Watson, how’s it feel when someone tells you you could get over it if you’d just _try harder_?”

She hit him. Not well, and not nearly hard enough. She might have done more damage if she’d angled her fist better, and the leverage from across the table was all wrong, but his chair rocked back with a satisfying clang.

He was laughing even before he’d uncrossed his eyes. “I almost wish I planned to stick around, Watson!” he shouted as she turned her back. “You’ve got no bloody idea what’s headed your way.”

She slammed the door behind her. Her hand was going to bruise, but it was her leg that hurt.

***

She went straight from there to Holmes’ office. The man hadn’t warned her. He should have warned her.

Mycroft smiled—actually smiled!—as she came in. Physically, he hadn’t changed much since she’d last seen him. Hair a little thinner, she thought. “How can I be of service?”

“He’s lying,” she said without preamble. He didn’t bother to pretend at confusion. “You know he’s lying. Those x-rays are forged, or he recovered better than expected, or _something_ , and he killed them, but he’s going to get off. You can stop it happening.”

“So can you.”

“ _I_ can?” She laughed, a short huff of disbelief. “What sort of pull do you imagine I’ve got?”

“I don’t mean political influence. Go to Detective Inspector Lestrade and tell him to put you on the stand. Tell him exactly what Sonia Ginzberg said about Sebastian Moran. Tell him which names you overheard during that telephone conversation.”

“I didn’t hear any names.”

“Is that mentioned explicitly in your signed statement from three years ago?” He’d raised his eyebrows ever so slightly.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t read that statement. And—”

“So a direct assertion of Moran’s guilt would not contradict your earlier testimony.”

“You want me to perjure myself.”

He looked at her with pitying eyes. She wanted to scream. “You asked me for help. I’m telling you how to help yourself. I seem to recall a conversation in which you accused me of sending others to die in the trenches while I kept my hands clean. Now you come to me to request my interference in routine legal proceedings. Whose hands will _you_ dirty, Dr Watson?”

She unclenched her teeth to reply. “You can’t want him to go free. You of all people—”

“I?”

“I wasn’t the only one with a sister, Mycroft!”

Too far, surely. She thought he would have to react. Instead he sighed as though he found all this unutterably wearisome. “The moment it suits my purposes to have Sebastian Moran put safely away, you may be assured I will exert myself to do so. Just now I find him more useful as a free man.”

“But _why_?”

“Because my grasp of the facts far exceeds your own. You may do whatever you like. If you choose to testify against him, I won’t prevent you.”

She would not perjure herself. For a moment she wanted to—God, how she wanted to—but she knew she’d never be able to stomach it. Lestrade would know, and he’d never let it stand; and even if he did, he would still know, and that would be more than she could take.

Her hand was shaking. Mycroft had already turned back to his paperwork. “No,” she said. He looked up without much interest. “You can do something. I know you can. You said as much three years ago, but you wouldn’t make a move until she’d torn London wide open and neither of us could stay, and by then it was too late. People died. Sherlock died, Mycroft.”

“And you blame me for that.” He laid that on the desk between them as a flat statement of fact.

Jo had to think about it. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m done blaming you, or myself, or even her, but Moran I can blame. Do something. Please.”

He gave her an assessing look, and then he opened his desk drawer. She couldn’t see what was inside. “Once again, Dr Watson, I’m afraid I must lay this at your door. If you won’t lie to the police, perhaps you’ll accept a more active role.” Then he took out her gun and set it on the desk.

She stared down at it. It was hers, she was quite certain; she still knew every scratch in that glossy surface. “You’ve kept that in your drawer all this time?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “But I had—let us say a suspicion—it might be useful today. Moran’s medical records are on their way to Scotland Yard as we speak. I doubt he will remain there for long. What happens when he walks out those doors is entirely up to you.”

“You bastard,” she said calmly.

His eyes glinted. “I see by your hand you don’t mind.”

She reached for the gun, and her fingers were perfectly steady. They closed about the familiar handle and stilled.

“It’s in excellent repair,” he offered.

“I’m sure. But what’s in it for you? If Moran free is better than Moran imprisoned, what use is Moran dead?”

“Moran himself is immaterial. Now, if you don’t mind, I do have matters of rather more importance to attend to. You have my offer. Take it, Dr Watson, or leave it.”

She left his office with a comfortable weight at her hip.

***

Jo lay awake that night and thought about Sonia Ginzberg and Sherlock Holmes. She thought about Jefferson Hope, she thought about the way it had felt to level her gun at Phil Sutton, and then she rang her sister.

“Three in the morning,” Harry said in a voice fuzzy with sleep. “What d’you want?”

“Remember when you phoned me the week before Christmas?”

Harry’d been up north on business, all alone in a hotel room with a bottle of very expensive Scotch. “Yes. Jo, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, yet.”

Sleepiness had given way to alarm. “Are you at home?”

“You told me afterward you never drank a drop.”

“I didn’t. Jo, what is it? I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“No, I’m fine. Really I’m fine. It’s just—you wanted it. I could hear how badly. How do you move on from that?”

Harry went quiet. “You can’t make a life out of wants, Jo,” she said at last. “And it doesn’t help to judge yourself for them, either. You just accept them. The important part is what you do.”

Ginzberg had said something very like that, Jo remembered. Perhaps it was time to weigh the advice by its worth, not by its source.

When morning came, she locked the gun in her bedside table and got ready for work.

Lestrade rang later that week to break the news, but by then she’d talked herself into accepting it. Moran had been right; they had his record, the word of a dead woman, and what bits and pieces Scotland Yard had scraped together, and what kind of proof was that against hard medical evidence? Sherlock had been wrong before. Surely it was some sort of betrayal not to back her now, but no-one could spin a brilliant and rational explanation out of ash.

So Jo sat back and watched as the Yard faltered, and failed, and let him go.

***

 _Life goes on_ , she thought; death, too. She’d seen more than her share on the battlefield, but even a humble GP had to face it now and then.

“It’s done,” she said to Dr Narita, her pet oncologist at Barts. “Sorry to call you in for nothing.”

“That fast?” He looked at his watch. “How long ago?”

“Barely half an hour.” She let herself crack a yawn. It was late, and Mr Harrow would forgive her lack of decorum. She’d liked him. “He just slipped off.”

Narita nodded. “Happens like that, sometimes. You dig in for the long haul, everyone braces for the pain and the waiting, and then it’s done before you know it. I did think he’d have a few weeks left, at least. Did his daughter make it in?”

“She’s three hours away.”

“Pity. They were close.”

“It’s just as well. He didn’t want her to see it. He told me so just last week.” He frowned at her, and she managed a tired smile. “He went out on his own terms, or as near to it as anyone can. You can’t ask for much more than that.” She imagined herself at eighty-three, slipping away in a hospital bed, and wondered who’d be sitting beside her. It was an easy scenario to entertain. She thought back a few years and tried to remember how she’d have defined her own terms, back then. Funny how quickly expectations changed.

Narita was still watching her. Was that concern or something else? Maybe she’d let her thoughts show on her face. _Can’t have that, Jo._ “All right, I’m off. There’s paperwork.”

“You could finish that tomorrow,” he suggested. “There’s no rush. Who’s the pathologist on duty? Hooper or Milverton?”

She blinked. “No idea.” Neither of them, at a guess, given the hour. And how should she know? She ought to look in on Molly more often. “It’s fine. I’ll just take it with me. I’ve left some work back at the clinic anyhow, might as well finish up.”

“Good night, Watson.”

She nodded at his back when he turned toward his office, then took the chart from the charge nurse on duty. Death and paperwork, two certainties in medicine and the army both.

The clinic was deserted when she got back. Sarah must have just locked up. Jo switched the lights back on and retreated to the consulting room where she’d left her briefcase, intent on reducing the mound of charting she’d started to accumulate. Halfway through, a knock startled her out of the methodical rhythm.

“Not seeing anyone just now,” she called, and hadn’t she locked the front door behind her? But this door had already opened, and two men were standing over her desk.

“Dr Watson?” said the first, though something in his inflection told her it wasn’t really a question.

“Yes.” Her voice sounded natural, at least to her ears, but her heart was pounding slow and strong, and every instinct she had was standing at attention. “It’s out of hours.”

They were unimpressed. “We need you to come with us.”

She stood to her full height, which came to a little less than five and a half feet. She had to tilt her head back to meet their eyes. “And why should I do that?”

“We’ve been authorised to use physical force if you make it necessary.”

Wrong answer. “Authorised by who, exactly?”

They didn’t answer. She looked at the phone on her desk, then smiled when one of them started forward in response. All right, then, if that was the way it had to be. “Lead on,” she said pleasantly. She moved for her coat, which hung near the door.

They fell in beside her, and she flexed her left hand experimentally. The nearest of them must have noticed, because he grabbed for her wrist. This was just the signal she needed. The swivel stool she used for exams was just beside the desk. It was waist high, easy enough to grab with both hands and swing up and around before either of them realised what she was about. Better if it had been a bit heavier on the far end, of course, but when she put all her weight behind it it made a satisfactory sort of cudgel. One blow to the head and the first man was down.

The next came at her without pause—not so slow on the uptake, this one—and she shoved the stool at him feet-first, which gave her just enough time to reach into the drawer beside her. They’d made a mistake coming for her here. The outer office, now, that would have been a good spot for an ambush, the detached part of her reflected, while the part of her receiving a businesslike tackle from fifteen stone of irritated hit-man was busy aiming a bare needle at the thick muscle of his neck. She went down hard under him, but she had at least the presence of mind to depress the plunger.

“That’s 3 mg of epinephrine,” she gasped into his ear before he could cut her off, and suddenly he was paying her an exquisite level of attention. “In a few seconds your blood pressure will skyrocket. You’ll recognise that because of the pounding headache and the pressure in your chest. A minute or two after that you’ll lose consciousness. I could tell you the next few steps, or we could just skip to the part where you go into cardiac arrest.”

He released her and backed off, which was much better. Jo sat up and rubbed the lump already forming on the back of her head. That hadn’t been an easy fall.

He was already short of breath. “Can—”

“I can try to counteract it, yes,” she said calmly. “But first you’re going to take hand me the pistol you’re carrying—nicely, now—and if you try anything I’ll be quite happy to sit and watch you expire.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said a cool voice from the doorway. Jo looked up to see Mycroft’s polished assistant standing there like something out of another life. She raised an eyebrow as she surveyed the scene. “This is what comes of shoddy hiring practises. What is the man thinking?”

“Who—Mycroft? But—”

“Quite,” she said. “Now suppose you counteract that injection so we can be on our way.”

Jo glanced at the man who’d just rolled off her. His face had gone purple, and he was clutching his chest, staring at her with plaintive eyes. “No need.”

“He’s clearly in distress.”

“The power of suggestion,” Jo said. She of all people knew better than to underestimate psychosomatic symptoms. “That wasn’t epinephrine—it was a flu vaccine. Have you had one before? Deep breaths. Ever had a reaction? No? You’ll be fine.”

Jo grabbed for the cane resting beside the coat-rack and used it to lever herself to her feet. She tested her bad leg and found it would hold, and Anthea gave her a brilliant smile. “I have a car waiting out front.”

“Where are we going?”

“Baker Street.”

“Explanations on the way?”

“When we get there.”

It would do. “All right,” Jo said. “Wasn’t so difficult, was it?” she said over her shoulder, and they left Mycroft’s hired guns in two massive heaps behind them.

There were, in fact, two cars waiting at the kerb. One was empty. The other had a driver and the engine running, and Anthea held the door for Jo to step inside. “What, you weren’t with them?”

“ _I_ would not have taken ‘safe and immediate delivery at any cost’ to mean ‘physical intimidation as a first resort’, but the directive wasn’t given to me.”

“But Mycroft—”

“Is managing his own affairs at the moment,” Anthea said. She was shockingly talkative tonight. “I have other concerns.”

“So why are you—”

“For old times’ sake. And because things are just about to get interesting.”

“But what—”

“As I said: when we get to Baker Street.” She’d pulled out a small tablet and was already tapping away, which was at least familiar. Jo swallowed a dozen other questions, tucked her cold hands under her arms, and sat back to wait.

When they arrived, there was a light on upstairs, and she could see the outlines of two people moving behind the curtains. Jo hesitated at the door, mental alarms going off at full volume.

Anthea shouldered past her and unlocked the door, clutching a key-ring Jo had never seen before. Jo choked back a protest. It was far too late to complain about the invasion of her privacy.

There was only one person in the sitting room by the time they made it there, though she could hear someone—Savitri?—rattling around in the next room. Meanwhile, Mycroft Holmes was seated on the couch, umbrella tap tapping against his leg. He lifted his eyebrows at them.

“Your men are intact,” Anthea said lightly. Her eyes shot to Jo. “Mostly.”

“I’m glad to hear it. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He was being cautious, and not of Jo, she realised. Of Anthea, then? Exactly what had become of his covert little dominion?

“Our areas of interest still intersect,” Anthea said. She sounded bored. “This falls between them.”

“I see. Peters tipped you off, I take it.”

She shrugged. “Old habits.”

“Fascinating as this is,” Jo broke in, “I’d really like to know what you’re both doing here. And what have you done with our things?” She’d run an eye over the sitting room and discovered the sudden and unsettling absence of several stacks of books she’d come to think of as permanent, the antique clock missing from its usual place on the mantle, Savitri’s woven throw gone from its perch on the back of the armchair—all Savitri’s things, not Jo’s, she realised. “What’s going on?”

“Two hours ago, Ronald Adair was shot through his office window,” Mycroft said. “It was a head shot at over a hundred metres. His death was pronounced at the scene.”

Well, at least she knew for certain he’d been lying about his left hand. _I might have prevented it_ ; but even as the thought this, she knew she could never have taken that shot. Nor would she have been in the right if she had done. “Adair. I know that name. Was he the judge in Owens’ trial?”

“Precisely. The significance of the murder method will not have escaped you.” His eyes went to the windows. “I hope you will not take it amiss if I suggest the immediate purchase of some blackout curtains.”

“But that’s so _obvious_. Why would he—”

“Obvious, yes,” Mycroft agreed. “Blatant, in fact. And also very public.” He smiled in clear satisfaction. “Almost a declaration, you might say, and not one likely to escape the notice of any interested parties, whether at home or abroad.”

“I don’t understand,” Jo began, and was interrupted when Savitri came in, a half-empty packing box in her arms. She smiled at Jo with an odd mix of reluctance and assurance. “Wait, what—”

“I’m being reassigned,” Savitri said. “Quite soon.”

Jo opened her mouth, then closed it with a snap.

Mycroft was examining his fingernails. “I thought a bare minimum of warning might be appreciated before this very comfortable arrangement was dissolved.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense! Moran’s killed again and she’s going _away_? I don’t want—”

“Orders,” Savitri said, shrugging. “It’s been nice, being in the same place for more than a month or two, but I knew it wouldn’t last.”

Jo turned on Mycroft, confusion crumbling under the weight of her anger. “What gives you the right to storm into my home”

“I didn’t orchestrate this,” he said mildly. “Events are moving quite out of my control. Though not, I trust, entirely beyond my influence. You will be assigned a more substantial security detail, and Ms Naidu will remain here until her next assignment has been arranged.”

Savitri crossed to the kitchen, leaving Jo alone and defenceless. She stared between Mycroft and his—no longer assistant, judging by their conversation. Add that to the mounting list of things she didn’t understand. “But why do you _care_?” she cried. “Three years and you can’t just let it alone? What’s so important about me?”

“I assure you, Dr Watson, I’m as much in the dark as you are on that particular matter, but important you evidently are.”

“I’ve _never_ been important to Moriarty. Not to Moran, not to Kempe, not to any of them.”

“Reflect on that, if you would.” He stood and looked to Anthea. “We should co-ordinate our efforts on this.”

“I suppose we might as well.”

He gestured to the door with a sweep of one arm. “After you.”

“What efforts?” Jo demanded. “You can’t just keep me in the dark like this.”

“No,” he agreed, “not for very much longer.” His mouth quirked. “Welcome back, Dr Watson.”

Jo stood alone in the sitting room and listened to the fall of their feet on the stairs. From the kitchen, she could hear the clatter of dishes as Savitri continued packing with practised efficiency.

When it was quiet again, she sank down into her chair. The ache in her leg had faded to background noise, and her spine sat a little straighter than it had just an hour before. Whether for good or ill, Jo didn’t claim to know, but something vital had changed in the London air.

 _Welcome back_.


End file.
